Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisWith Reading the Obscene, Jordan Carroll reveals new insights about the editors who fought the most famous anti-censorship battles of the twentieth century. While many critics have interpreted obscenity as a form of populist protest, Reading the Obscene shows that the editors who worked to dismantle censorship often catered to elite audiences composed primarily of white men in the professional-managerial class. As Carroll argues, transgressive editors, such as H. L. Mencken at the Smart Set and the American Mercury, William Gaines and Al Feldstein at EC Comics, Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, taught their readers to approach even the most scandalizing texts with the same cold calculation and professional reserve they employed in their occupations. Along the way, these editors kicked off a middle-class sexual revolution in which white-collar professionals imagined they could control sexuality through management science. Obscenity is often presented as self-shattering and subversive, but with this provocative work Carroll calls into question some of the most sensational claims about obscenity, suggesting that when transgression becomes a sign of class distinction, we must abandon the idea that obscenity always overturns hierarchies and disrupts social order. Winner of the 2022 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, sponsored by the Modern Language AssociationTrade Review"In Carroll's hands, the question of obscenity in midcentury literature has a whole new conceptual frame and in the figure of theeditor, a whole new protagonist. Going where few critical works before it have dared to tread, this is a highly persuasive and lucidly readable contribution to twentieth-century American cultural studies."—Mark McGurl, Stanford University"A thoroughly enjoyable examination of the role that literary obscenity played in forging the professional-managerial white male commitment to 'free speech.' Jordan Carroll shows that defending obscene literature enshrined modes of dispassion that served liberals' professional climbing."—Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University"What draws us to the obscene? It's a question scholars rarely ask because the allure of the forbidden seems so obvious. What if, though, for the white male professional-managerial class of the mid-to-late twentieth century, the enticement of the obscene was not so hot but rather cool? What if the point of reading smut was not to indulge in prurient interest but to show oneself capable of overcoming such base impulses? Not to masturbate, but to master? Such is the gambit of Jordan S. Carroll's Reading the Obscene, which charts a bildungsroman of boomer hermeneutics."—Whitney Strub, The Baffler"[I]n his Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature, Jordan S. Carroll is interested in a different, subtler aspect of the era's creeping corporatization. Rather than examining how the economics of publishing affected culture, Carroll considers how its class politics drove the industry's challenges to censorship, asserting that the 'values and training of the professional-managerial class (PMC)' were the driving force behind publishing's challenges to obscenity laws."—Greg Barnhisel, American Literary History"Carroll's surprising argument is that editors trained PMC men in the exigent art of cool detachment through obscenity.... Reading the Obscene teems with telling details and relishes double-entendres."—Dan Sinykin, ASAP/JournalTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Naked Editor 1. Shocking the Middle Class 2. An Aristocracy of Smut 3. Decrypting EC Comics 4. Reading Playboy for the Science Fiction 5. Mad Ones, Mad Men 6. White-Collar Masochism Conclusion: Transgression in the Post-pornographic Era

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Book SynopsisAn incisive demonstration of how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist. By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age.Trade Review"A veteran Orwell scholar, Stansky provides a sketch of his subject's formative experiences before, during, and after some of the most seismic convulsions of the past century.... He makes an admirable attempt to present the real Orwell in all his seeming contradictions, a socialist who loved his capitalist homeland, a decent man who came to see the necessity of war, and a leftist who reviled communist tyranny."—Michael Washburn, The National Review"The evolution of the English writer George Orwell's thinking about war is instructive. In this slim and readable volume, Stansky considers how four wars transformed Orwell's worldview."—Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs"The Socialist Patriot is a considered analysis of the role of war in the development of Orwell's thinking, notably his sudden shifts from one ideological position to its polar opposite. In its text, as in its title, it captures what would be the two constants informing Orwell's engagement with the momentous events of his time."—Martin Tyrell, Dublin Review of BooksTable of Contents0. Preface: Writing about George Orwell: An Autobiographical Introduction 1. Before the First World War 2. The First World War 3. The Spanish Civil War 4. The Second World War 5. The Cold War

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Book SynopsisIt had never been attempted before, and might never be done again. One man watching another man write a novel from beginning to end. On September 1, 2014, in an 11th floor apartment in New York, Lee Child embarked on the twentieth book in his globally successful Jack Reacher series. Andy Martin was there to see him do it, sitting a couple of yards behind him, peering over his shoulder as the writer took another drag of a Camel cigarette and tapped out the first sentence: “Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.” Miraculously, Child and Martin stuck with it, in tandem, for the next 8 months, right through to the bitter-sweet end and the last word, “needle”. Reacher Said Nothing is a one-of-a-kind meta-book, an uncompromising account in real time of the genesis, evolution and completion of a single work, Make Me. While unveiling the art of writing a thriller Martin also gives us a unique insight into the everyday life of an exemplary writer. From beginning to end, Martin captures all the sublime confidence, stumbling uncertainty, omniscience, cluelessness, ecstasy, despair, and heart-thumping suspense that go into writing a number-one bestseller.Trade Review�Love Jack Reacher? You'll have to enjoy this... [Andy Martin] revels in the minutiae you didn't realize you wanted to know.� Shortlist �It's fascinating to watch the process of writing unfolding in real time... it shouldn't work - after all writing is a predominantly mental activity - and yet it does in a way that makes you wonder why no-one's thought of doing this before... Andy Martin has created something new here: a fusion of literary criticism, biography and fly-on-the-wall meta-novel which serves as a remarkable insight into the creative process.�Spectator �Very entertaining. Until Child can be persuaded to publish his own version of Stephen King's On Writing, I think it will be a wise investment for anybody who wants to write popular fiction.�Jake Kerridge, Daily TelegraphTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 Part 1: Politics and You 7 Part 2: Making Your Voice Heard 29 Part 3: Politics is a Team Sport 67 Part 4: It’s All Marketing 131 Part 5: Let the Campaigns Begin 189 Part 6: Presidential Politics 263 Part 7: The Part of Tens 311 Appendix: State ID Voting Requirements 331 Index 353

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Book SynopsisA bracingly original dialogue on modernity, class, and difference in the 20th century

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Book SynopsisJack Kerouac: Tracing the Theme of Epiphany invites readers to survey and analyse Jack Kerouac’s works with particular focus on his constant exploration to discover what it means to live a meaningful life. The text helps readers understand how Kerouac contributed to and influenced American literature, becoming one of the most famous writers of the 20th century.Divided into eight chapters, the book begins with a chapter that examines the historical, cultural, and literary context that gave rise to the Beat Generation, then progresses chronologically through Jack Kerouac’s life from his birth in 1922 to his death in 1969. Dedicated chapters demonstrate how major life events and social and cultural influences—including the deaths of his brother and his father, the Great Depression, World War II, jazz music, his time at Columbia University, the rise of the Beat Generation, and more—significantly shaped his worldview and subsequently, his unique writing style. Throughout, the text demonstrates how Jack Kerouac always sought moments of clarity and epiphany, trying to make sense of the world around him.Jack Kerouac: Tracing the Theme of Epiphany is an ideal supplementary text for both undergraduate and graduate courses in literature and creative writing.

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Book SynopsisThe first full-length study of a once revolutionary visual and linguistic medium Literature has “died” many times—this book tells the story of its death by postcard. Picturing the Postcard looks to this unlikely source to shed light on our collective, modern-day obsession with new media. The postcard, almost unimaginably now, produced at the end of the nineteenth century the same anxieties and hopes that many people think are unique to twenty-first-century social media such as Facebook or Twitter. It promised a newly connected social world accessible to all and threatened the breakdown of authentic social relations and even of language. Arguing that “new media” is as much a discursive object as a material one, and that it is always in dialogue with the media that came before it, Monica Cure reconstructs the postcard’s history through journals, legal documents, and sources from popular culture, analyzing the postcard’s representation in fiction by well-known writers such as E. M. Forster and Edith Wharton and by more obscure writers like Anne Sedgwick and Herbert Flowerdew. Writers deployed uproar over the new medium of the postcard by Anglo-American cultural critics to mirror anxieties about the changing nature of the literary marketplace, which included the new role of women in public life, the appeal of celebrity and the loss of privacy, an increasing dependence on new technologies, and the rise of mass media. Literature kept open the postcard’s possibilities and in the process reimagined what literature could be. Trade Review"Picturing the Postcard recovers just how fraught and powerful a communications technology postcards were at the turn of the twentieth century. With a dazzling range of reference, Monica Cure demonstrates the remarkable cultural and literary power of the postcard and rewrites our contemporary narratives of new media."—Kate Marshall, author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction"Picturing the Postcard turns our attention to a small yet vital piece of nineteenth-century new media. Tracking the postcard’s outsized effects, in everything from touristic travel to the rise of feminism, Monica Cure illuminates an often-overlooked item whose cult popularity reveals much about modern life and culture in turn-of-the-century America and Britain."—Rachel Teukolsky, Venderbilt UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Frankenstein Postcard1. The Economic Postcard2. Insincerely Yours: The New Postcard and the New Woman3. Return to Sender: The Postcard Terror4. The Voracious Postcard: The Craze of CollectingPostscript: The Rewriting of the PostcardAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring how the figure of the “wild child” in contemporary fiction grapples with contemporary cultural anxieties about reproductive ethics and the future of humanity In the eighteenth century, Western philosophy positioned the figure of “the child” at the border between untamed nature and rational adulthood. Contemporary cultural anxieties about the ethics and politics of reproductive choice and the crisis of parental responsibility have freighted this liminal figure with new meaning in twenty-first-century narratives.In Wild Child, Naomi Morgenstern explores depictions of children and their adult caregivers in extreme situations—ranging from the violence of slavery and sexual captivity to accidental death, mass murder, torture, and global apocalypse—in such works as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Denis Villeneuve’s film Prisoners. Morgenstern shows how, in such narratives, “wild” children function as symptoms of new ethical crises and existential fears raised by transformations in the technology and politics of reproduction and by increased ethical questions about the very decision to reproduce. In the face of an uncertain future that no longer confirms the confidence of patriarchal humanism, such narratives displace or project present-day apprehensions about maternal sacrifice and paternal protection onto the wildness of children in a series of hyperbolically violent scenes.Urgent and engaging, Wild Child offers the only extended consideration of how twenty-first-century fiction has begun to imagine the decision to reproduce and the ethical challenges of posthumanist parenting.Trade Review"Your child isn’t civilized. Neither are you. Expect the child to be more productively destructive and survivalist than you imagined, showing us to be the techno-relational-vulnerable animals that we are, strange to the core in crisis and change. Also expect that you won’t find a smarter, more forthright, and beautifully nuanced guide to these thoughts than Naomi Morgenstern. Impressive and persuasive."—Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century"Wild Child is a brilliant and thoroughly engaging study of reproductive ethics and the ethics of parenting in narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Naomi Morgenstern's command of theoretical texts, both philosophical and psychoanalytic, is prodigious, and her writing style is vibrant—at once theoretically complex and alive with personal twists and turns of language."—Jean Wyatt, author of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later NovelsTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Posthumanist Wild Child1. Is There a Space of Maternal Ethics? Emma Donoghue’s Room2. Postapocalyptic Responsibility: Patriarchy at the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road3. Maternal Love/Maternal Violence: Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy4. “Monstrous Decision”: Destruction and Relation in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin5. “Dis-ap-peared”: Endangered Children in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana”Afterword: The Pretense of the Human from Victor of Aveyron to Nim ChimpskyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring how the figure of the “wild child” in contemporary fiction grapples with contemporary cultural anxieties about reproductive ethics and the future of humanity In the eighteenth century, Western philosophy positioned the figure of “the child” at the border between untamed nature and rational adulthood. Contemporary cultural anxieties about the ethics and politics of reproductive choice and the crisis of parental responsibility have freighted this liminal figure with new meaning in twenty-first-century narratives.In Wild Child, Naomi Morgenstern explores depictions of children and their adult caregivers in extreme situations—ranging from the violence of slavery and sexual captivity to accidental death, mass murder, torture, and global apocalypse—in such works as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Denis Villeneuve’s film Prisoners. Morgenstern shows how, in such narratives, “wild” children function as symptoms of new ethical crises and existential fears raised by transformations in the technology and politics of reproduction and by increased ethical questions about the very decision to reproduce. In the face of an uncertain future that no longer confirms the confidence of patriarchal humanism, such narratives displace or project present-day apprehensions about maternal sacrifice and paternal protection onto the wildness of children in a series of hyperbolically violent scenes.Urgent and engaging, Wild Child offers the only extended consideration of how twenty-first-century fiction has begun to imagine the decision to reproduce and the ethical challenges of posthumanist parenting.Trade Review"Your child isn’t civilized. Neither are you. Expect the child to be more productively destructive and survivalist than you imagined, showing us to be the techno-relational-vulnerable animals that we are, strange to the core in crisis and change. Also expect that you won’t find a smarter, more forthright, and beautifully nuanced guide to these thoughts than Naomi Morgenstern. Impressive and persuasive."—Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century"Wild Child is a brilliant and thoroughly engaging study of reproductive ethics and the ethics of parenting in narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Naomi Morgenstern's command of theoretical texts, both philosophical and psychoanalytic, is prodigious, and her writing style is vibrant—at once theoretically complex and alive with personal twists and turns of language."—Jean Wyatt, author of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later NovelsTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Posthumanist Wild Child1. Is There a Space of Maternal Ethics? Emma Donoghue’s Room2. Postapocalyptic Responsibility: Patriarchy at the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road3. Maternal Love/Maternal Violence: Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy4. “Monstrous Decision”: Destruction and Relation in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin5. “Dis-ap-peared”: Endangered Children in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana”Afterword: The Pretense of the Human from Victor of Aveyron to Nim ChimpskyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn unprecedented examination of class-bridging reform and U.S. literary history at the turn of the twentieth century Reading for Reform rewrites the literary history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America by putting social reform institutions at the center of literary and cultural analysis. Examining the vibrant, often fractious literary cultures that developed as part of the Progressive mandate to uplift the socially disadvantaged, it shows that in these years reformers saw literature as a way to combat the myriad social problems that plagued modern U.S. society. As they developed distinctly literary methods for Americanizing immigrants, uplifting and refining wage-earning women, and educating black students, their institutions gave rise to a new social purpose for literature.Class-bridging reform institutions—the urban settlement house, working girls’ club, and African American college—are rarely addressed in literary history. Yet, Laura R. Fisher argues, they engendered important experiments in the form and social utility of American literature, from minor texts of Yiddish drama and little-known periodical and reform writers to the fiction of Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen. Fisher delves into reform’s vast and largely unexplored institutional archives to show how dynamic sites of modern literary culture developed at the margins of social power. Fisher reveals how reformist approaches to race, class, religion, and gender formation shaped American literature between the 1880s and the 1920s. In doing so, she tells a new story about the fate of literary practice, and the idea of literature’s practical value, during the very years that modernist authors were proclaiming art’s autonomy from concepts of social utility. Trade Review"At once richly archival and theoretically nuanced, Reading for Reform investigates a neglected period of U.S. literary history by exploring how settlement houses, working girls’ clubs, and African American colleges influenced the era’s fiction. It is necessary reading for any student of Progressive Era literature and print culture."—Mary Chapman, author of Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism"Reading for Reform is an extraordinary exploration not only of the possibility but also the limits of empathy. Arguing that Progressive Era reform institutions took reading literature to be instrumental, not merely persuasive, Laura R. Fisher suggests that negative reactions to this task-oriented idea about reading paved the way for new modes of storytelling in subsequent decades."—Brad Evans, Rutgers University"Elegantly written, Reading for Reform breaks important new ground in United States literary studies, contributing to vital contemporary conversations about labor, class, working-class women’s literary cultures, and U.S. literary aesthetics. Laura R. Fisher carefully examines the role of Progressive Era institutions in authorizing certain forms of literary expression and offers richly detailed case studies of how particular reform institutions generate versions of the ‘literary’ and uphold distinctions in the literary field. It is a revisionist work of fine-grained literary history of a very high quality."—Lori Merish, author of Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the AntebellumTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Politics of Proximity1. Sites of Contact: The Settlement House2. The Problem with Comparison: The Working Girls’ Club3. Correlation and Conformity: From the African American College to the Harlem Renaissance4. Forms of Mediation: Undercover LiteratureCoda: Twenty-First Century AfterlivesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn unprecedented examination of class-bridging reform and U.S. literary history at the turn of the twentieth century Reading for Reform rewrites the literary history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America by putting social reform institutions at the center of literary and cultural analysis. Examining the vibrant, often fractious literary cultures that developed as part of the Progressive mandate to uplift the socially disadvantaged, it shows that in these years reformers saw literature as a way to combat the myriad social problems that plagued modern U.S. society. As they developed distinctly literary methods for Americanizing immigrants, uplifting and refining wage-earning women, and educating black students, their institutions gave rise to a new social purpose for literature.Class-bridging reform institutions—the urban settlement house, working girls’ club, and African American college—are rarely addressed in literary history. Yet, Laura R. Fisher argues, they engendered important experiments in the form and social utility of American literature, from minor texts of Yiddish drama and little-known periodical and reform writers to the fiction of Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen. Fisher delves into reform’s vast and largely unexplored institutional archives to show how dynamic sites of modern literary culture developed at the margins of social power. Fisher reveals how reformist approaches to race, class, religion, and gender formation shaped American literature between the 1880s and the 1920s. In doing so, she tells a new story about the fate of literary practice, and the idea of literature’s practical value, during the very years that modernist authors were proclaiming art’s autonomy from concepts of social utility. Trade Review"At once richly archival and theoretically nuanced, Reading for Reform investigates a neglected period of U.S. literary history by exploring how settlement houses, working girls’ clubs, and African American colleges influenced the era’s fiction. It is necessary reading for any student of Progressive Era literature and print culture."—Mary Chapman, author of Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism"Reading for Reform is an extraordinary exploration not only of the possibility but also the limits of empathy. Arguing that Progressive Era reform institutions took reading literature to be instrumental, not merely persuasive, Laura R. Fisher suggests that negative reactions to this task-oriented idea about reading paved the way for new modes of storytelling in subsequent decades."—Brad Evans, Rutgers University"Elegantly written, Reading for Reform breaks important new ground in United States literary studies, contributing to vital contemporary conversations about labor, class, working-class women’s literary cultures, and U.S. literary aesthetics. Laura R. Fisher carefully examines the role of Progressive Era institutions in authorizing certain forms of literary expression and offers richly detailed case studies of how particular reform institutions generate versions of the ‘literary’ and uphold distinctions in the literary field. It is a revisionist work of fine-grained literary history of a very high quality."—Lori Merish, author of Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the AntebellumTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Politics of Proximity1. Sites of Contact: The Settlement House2. The Problem with Comparison: The Working Girls’ Club3. Correlation and Conformity: From the African American College to the Harlem Renaissance4. Forms of Mediation: Undercover LiteratureCoda: Twenty-First Century AfterlivesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisNobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset’s life at Bjerkebæk, her retreat in Lillehammer, NorwayInside the Gate offers readers a rare glimpse into Sigrid Undset’s life at her home, Bjerkebæk, now a museum and national landmark in Lillehammer, Norway. Immensely protective of her privacy, Undset filled the timbered house with books and created a writing space where she authored many of her famous works, including Kristin Lavransdatter. There she also raised her three children, tended to her beloved garden, and welcomed close friends and family members during three decades of personal joys, sorrows, and hard work.Drawing on a wealth of historical documents, Nan Bentzen Skille’s lively narrative presents an intimate portrait of Sigrid Undset’s intense emotional life and creative endeavors, with Bjerkebæk at the center of it all. Many photographs vividly illustrate the text. For readers who have long admired Undset’s literature, Inside the Gate provides new insight into the life and work of the Nobel Prize winner.Trade Review"A refreshing new look at the personal side of Sigrid Undset."—Bergens Tidende"Easy to read, richly illustrated, and at the same time written with great professional expertise."—Aftenposten"A lavish edition in every sense of the word, brimming with materials that have never been seen before."—VG"One of the joys of Inside the Gate is the many photographs and drawings of Undset, her children, the property at Bjerkebæk, and various memorabilia. The author reconstructs several key events in Undset’s life, such as a child’s confirmation party, detailing who likely attended, what they ate, and what Undset was writing about at the time."—Scandinavian HourTable of ContentsContents Foreword Lillehammer Station – Disembark on the right Sigrid Undset makes herself a home With an office in “Norway’s most beautiful home” The “guesthouse” that became the “priest’s house” The garden – “the third loveliest” in the world The children at Bjerkebæk Mathea Mortenstuen Miniature theaters and other sorts of drama The Nobel Prize comes to Lillehammer The difficult thirties “Fight for all that you hold dear” The curtain falls Epilogue Notes Chronology Photo credits

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Book SynopsisExploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon.Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification.Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.Trade Review"Black Bourgeois will be the definitive study of literary images of the black middle class from the 1980s to our present moment. With stunning new insight, Candice M. Jenkins focuses on the vulnerability tied to black middle-class embodiment. This book adds new dimensions to the study of blackness and class by foregrounding the tension between the vulnerability of the black body and the ‘cover’ of material privilege. Jenkins exposes the forces that make black subjects remain vulnerable, socially and bodily, as they live ‘bourgeois’ lives."—Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics "Black Bourgeois brilliantly highlights how contemporary African American cultural producers render the conundrum faced by the black middle class as they negotiate the limits of class privilege and their own vulnerability within the U.S. racial hierarchy. In texts such as School Daze, Black Girl in Paris, and Queen Sugar, Candice M. Jenkins astutely tracks the ways that the black middle class figure, as an embodiment of a specific intersection of race and class, represents both the precarity and the promise of black life."—Lisa B. Thompson, author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

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Book SynopsisExploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon.Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification.Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.Trade Review"Black Bourgeois will be the definitive study of literary images of the black middle class from the 1980s to our present moment. With stunning new insight, Candice M. Jenkins focuses on the vulnerability tied to black middle-class embodiment. This book adds new dimensions to the study of blackness and class by foregrounding the tension between the vulnerability of the black body and the ‘cover’ of material privilege. Jenkins exposes the forces that make black subjects remain vulnerable, socially and bodily, as they live ‘bourgeois’ lives."—Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics "Black Bourgeois brilliantly highlights how contemporary African American cultural producers render the conundrum faced by the black middle class as they negotiate the limits of class privilege and their own vulnerability within the U.S. racial hierarchy. In texts such as School Daze, Black Girl in Paris, and Queen Sugar, Candice M. Jenkins astutely tracks the ways that the black middle class figure, as an embodiment of a specific intersection of race and class, represents both the precarity and the promise of black life."—Lisa B. Thompson, author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

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Book SynopsisA reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe’s traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism.In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma—including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies—Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production.Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.Trade Review"Glissant and the Middle Passage is an ingeniously cast light on Glissant’s remarkable philosophical proposition to the world from the Caribbean geography of reason. It critically shows how the singularity of a Caribbean mode of thought strikingly disrupts admitted stances on crucial philosophical precepts to fruitfully expand and broaden the realm of a philosophy that ordinarily centered its concerns and frames of reference around an established European worldview."—Hanétha Vété-Congolo, Bowdoin College"Glissant and the Middle Passage is the single most comprehensive and compelling treatment to date of the philosophical dimension of Édouard Glissant’s non-fiction. John E. Drabinski maps Glissant’s geography of reason in the mode of a postcolonial ‘intensification of qualities,’ summoning a philosophy of post-traumatic relationality that tracks the philosophical valences and aftershocks of the Middle Passage. Essential reading."—Nick Nesbitt, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsContentsAbbreviationsPrefaceIntroduction: Between Europe and the Americas1. Origins I: Memory, Root, Abyss2. Origins II: Memory, Future, Abyss3. Ontology of an Abyssal Subject4. Aesthetics of an Abyssal Subject5. Thinking and Building: What Is an Intellectual?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisBringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native AmericansThe Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context. Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politicsMeticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.Trade Review"With his own array of historicist assiduity, keen sensitivity to contemporary issues, and a storyteller’s verve, James H. Cox uncovers the multitudes of political ambivalences that American Indian literature contains. He introduces a trove of unknown works and challenges us to make sense of them with our assumptions of what’s requisite for Native political perspectives. As he compellingly demonstrates, that’s a hard row to hoe."—Joshua B. Nelson, author of Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture"In this field-changing study, James H. Cox introduces the political array, a paradigm that allows him to demonstrate that Native texts and their authors are more politically complicated—more nuanced, more situational, more dynamic and fluid—than our all too often reductive generalizations indicate. More, he makes visible previously understudied connections between pre- and post-1968 Native writers. Elegantly researched, wonderfully lucid, and truly essential."—Eric G. Anderson, George Mason University"Cox’s monograph will prompt a variety of scholars to continue to add to and complicate what is an important and necessary endeavor—to understand the complexities and contradictions that shape and are shaped by Indigenous literary history in the United States."—Transmotion"What Cox’s text offers is a new paradigm from which to consider the study of American Indian literature, and for that alone he should be justly lauded."—Tribal College

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Book SynopsisBringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native AmericansThe Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context. Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politicsMeticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.Trade Review"With his own array of historicist assiduity, keen sensitivity to contemporary issues, and a storyteller’s verve, James H. Cox uncovers the multitudes of political ambivalences that American Indian literature contains. He introduces a trove of unknown works and challenges us to make sense of them with our assumptions of what’s requisite for Native political perspectives. As he compellingly demonstrates, that’s a hard row to hoe."—Joshua B. Nelson, author of Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture"In this field-changing study, James H. Cox introduces the political array, a paradigm that allows him to demonstrate that Native texts and their authors are more politically complicated—more nuanced, more situational, more dynamic and fluid—than our all too often reductive generalizations indicate. More, he makes visible previously understudied connections between pre- and post-1968 Native writers. Elegantly researched, wonderfully lucid, and truly essential."—Eric G. Anderson, George Mason University"Cox’s monograph will prompt a variety of scholars to continue to add to and complicate what is an important and necessary endeavor—to understand the complexities and contradictions that shape and are shaped by Indigenous literary history in the United States."—Transmotion"What Cox’s text offers is a new paradigm from which to consider the study of American Indian literature, and for that alone he should be justly lauded."—Tribal College

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Book SynopsisJapan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era.This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more.The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyō, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.Trade Review"A compelling and visionary analysis. William O. Gardner traces shared imaginations of the future city in postwar Japanese fiction, film, and architecture, brilliantly demonstrating the originality of Japanese visions of cities and societies to come. At the same time, he shows how even the most innovative urban visions of recent novels and anime are anchored in ancient Japanese aesthetic and building traditions. A must-read for anyone interested in urban studies, architecture, and science fiction—or, quite simply, the future."—Ursula K. Heise, author of Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species"The Metabolist Imagination is an ambitious and meticulously researched study of the intersections of science fiction and architectural discourse in postwar through contemporary Japan, an innovative pairing that leads to numerous insights across disciplines."—Seiji Lippit, author of Topographies of Japanese Modernism"William O. Gardner is a splendid scholar-critic of Japanese cityscape. The Metabolist Imagination brilliantly foregrounds the postmodern transactions between cutting edge architecture and emergent Japanese science fiction. No one has ever succeeded in exploring so provocatively the singular point between Metabolist works exhibited at EXPO70 and hardcore science fiction novels as represented by Sakyo Komatsu, one of the producers of the very exposition."—Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio University"The Metabolist Imagination—dense and scholarly but highly enjoyable and revealing, especially for someone who likes Japanese architecture and the occasional anime."—Daily Dose of Architecture"Eye-opening in more ways than one."—ArchiECHO"The Metabolist Imagination is a thrilling new contribution that disentangles Japan’s complex 1960s and 1970s from the vantage of interdisciplinary insight."—Journal of Asian Studies "The significant contribution of this book is to invite us to consider our relationship to the ever-changing natural/cultural environment by exploring the interrelationship between future-oriented architecture (and the city) and science fiction."—Journal of Japanese Studies "The Metabolist Imagination is an important contribution to Japanese urban studies and to the burgeoning scholarly discussion of Japan’s 1960s and 1970s. In its attention to architecture, popular literature, film, anime, collage, performance, and the ferment among those, it admirably demonstrates the rewards of an intermedial approach."—Monumenta NipponicaTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. City Visions: Metabolism and Science Fiction2. Ruined Cities: Isozaki Arata and Komatsu Sakyô3. Planetary Cities: Komatsu Sakyô’s Disaster Fiction4. Future City: The 1970 Osaka Expo5. Liquid Cities: The Technopolis from Expo to Cyberpunk6. Metabolist Echoes: Akira, Patlabor, and Yanobe KenjiNotesSelected FilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIntroducing a posthumanist concept of nostalgia to analyze steadily widening themes of animality, home, travel, slavery, shopping, and war in U.S. literature after 1945 In the Anthropocene, as climate change renders environments less stable, the human desire for place underscores the weakness of the individual in the face of the world. In this book, Ryan Hediger introduces a distinctive notion of homesickness, one in which the longing for place demonstrates not only human vulnerability but also intersubjectivity beyond the human. Arguing that this feeling is unavoidable and characteristically posthumanist, Hediger studies the complex mix of attitudes toward home, the homely, and the familiar in an age of resurgent cosmopolitanism, especially eco-cosmopolitanism. Homesickness closely examines U.S. literature mostly after 1945, including prominent writers such as Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, and Ernest Hemingway, in light of the challenges and themes of the Anthropocene. Hediger argues that our desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human and nonhuman; resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization that flatten differences and turn life and place into mere resources. Our homesickness, according to Hediger, is inevitable because the self is necessarily constructed with reference to the material past. Therefore, homesickness is not something to dismiss as nostalgic or reactionary but is rather a structure of feeling to come to terms with and even to cultivate.Recasting an expansive range of fields through the lens of homesickness—from ecocriticism to animal studies and disability studies, (eco)philosophy to posthumanist theory—Homesickness speaks not only to the desire for a physical structure or place but also to a wide range of longings and dislocations, including those related to subjectivity, memory, bodies, literary form, and language. Trade Review"For anyone who’s felt alienated from a mall, a suburb, a landscape, a culture, or our shared biosphere, this book offers homesickness as a powerful human desire, a mode of interpretation, a corrective to increased mobility, consumer capitalism, and utopian cosmopolitanism, and a hopeful sensibility that connects us with others—exactly what we need in our troubled times."—Jennifer Ladino, author of Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature"Ryan Hediger richly brings to life the feelings of homesickness that infuse cultural production amid the dislocations of capitalism, warfare, and the Anthropocene. His deeply researched and beautifully written book illuminates the experiences of weakness, mortality, and desire for home that have often been overlooked in the environmental humanities."—Teresa Shewry, author of Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature "Ryan Hediger’s Homesickness is an intriguing book that proposes its titular concept as a master category for reading twentieth- and twenty-first-century US art, particularly fiction and films."—ALH Online Review

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Book SynopsisExamining the personal library and the making of self When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner’s literary celebrity.What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making. Trade Review "A generous reassessment of Edith Wharton and materialized cultures. With this exceptional interpretation of the modern bookshelf, Sheila Liming offers page after page of unanticipated insight into gender and literary production. This is mandatory reading for those of us committed, like Wharton, to harboring ‘an ethos of collecting’—and for those of us, like this brave critic, committed to Wharton herself."—Scott Herring, Indiana University "This imaginative, deeply learned study illuminates the role of libraries and books for Edith Wharton, but it also provides an important examination of what the art of collecting books in the late nineteenth century tells us about how women writers and readers created networks of intellectual labor and ambition. Lyrically written and brilliantly argued, Sheila Liming’s study is also an indispensable meditation on the act of collecting and the unseen worlds ordinary and extraordinary readers and writers created through it."—Stephanie Foote, author of The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism "It makes sense that Liming would posit the meaning of libraries in general in a book about what a library means to a woman: the universalization of intellectual inheritance passes by necessity through women. Sheila Liming’s fascinating book proves her to be an exemplary heir."—Los Angeles Review of Books "An enormously valuable addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most literary bibliophiles."—ALH Online Review Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Library as Space: Self-Making and Social Endangerment in The Decoration of Houses and Summer2. The Library as Hoard: Collecting and Canonicity in The House of Mirth and Eline Vere3. The Library as Network: Affinity, Exchange, and the Makings of Authorship4. The Library as Tomb: Monuments and Memorials in Wharton’s Short FictionConclusionNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExamining the personal library and the making of self When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner’s literary celebrity.What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making. Trade Review "A generous reassessment of Edith Wharton and materialized cultures. With this exceptional interpretation of the modern bookshelf, Sheila Liming offers page after page of unanticipated insight into gender and literary production. This is mandatory reading for those of us committed, like Wharton, to harboring ‘an ethos of collecting’—and for those of us, like this brave critic, committed to Wharton herself."—Scott Herring, Indiana University "This imaginative, deeply learned study illuminates the role of libraries and books for Edith Wharton, but it also provides an important examination of what the art of collecting books in the late nineteenth century tells us about how women writers and readers created networks of intellectual labor and ambition. Lyrically written and brilliantly argued, Sheila Liming’s study is also an indispensable meditation on the act of collecting and the unseen worlds ordinary and extraordinary readers and writers created through it."—Stephanie Foote, author of The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism "It makes sense that Liming would posit the meaning of libraries in general in a book about what a library means to a woman: the universalization of intellectual inheritance passes by necessity through women. Sheila Liming’s fascinating book proves her to be an exemplary heir."—Los Angeles Review of Books "An enormously valuable addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most literary bibliophiles."—ALH Online Review Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Library as Space: Self-Making and Social Endangerment in The Decoration of Houses and Summer2. The Library as Hoard: Collecting and Canonicity in The House of Mirth and Eline Vere3. The Library as Network: Affinity, Exchange, and the Makings of Authorship4. The Library as Tomb: Monuments and Memorials in Wharton’s Short FictionConclusionNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement.Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.Trade Review"Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a wonderfully rich and first-rate account of the ways in which American literature records and critiques the material impact of the nuclear age. Jessica Hurley's focus on the infrastructure of the nuclear state, rather than on the possibility of totalizing destruction, enables a new understanding of post-45 American culture."—Daniel Grausam, author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War"Infrastructures of Apocalypse is an extraordinary book. It demonstrates how postwar American literature documents the ways that nuclear technology becomes national infrastructure, with consequences for how we can understand the distribution of risk and resource in the period. Jessica Hurley’s innovative readings and keen narrative sensibility render infrastructural relations at their most paradoxical and most political. This is an urgent and timely account of how our self-made apocalypses are entangled with long historical processes and what their alternate futures may comprise."—Kate Marshall, author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction "Modest and profound."—Jewish Currents "Infrastructures of Apocalypse will instantly take its place in the growing tradition of environmental justice criticism that is carefully attuned to the entangled legacies of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the environment—and to the potential of radical futureless-ness to enact a more just present."—ISLE "Hurley's writing is lively and consistently hopeful, despite the difficult subject matter she addresses."—Modern Language Review Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: End Times1. White Sovereignty and the Nuclear State2. Civil Defense and Black Apocalypse3. Star Wars, AIDS, and Queer Endings4. Nuclear Waste, Native America, Narrative FormCoda: Nuclear EntanglementsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matterCacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life. Trade Review "In dazzling readings of classic French texts, Annabel L. Kim reclaims feces as literary matter. Sidestepping familiar psychoanalytic frames, Kim turns excrement into a force for democracy. From Céline to Duras to Garréta, this caca communism blows up our old ways of thinking. Irreverent and erudite, as funny as Rabelais, Cacaphonies is a genuine scatological pleasure!"—Lynne Huffer, Emory University "We tend to assume that the trajectory of modern literature repeats that of society and technology (urbanization, sanitation, dematerialization, sanitization, deodorization) in taking us ever further away from the excretory body. It does not, insists Annabel L. Kim. On the contrary, modern literature refuses to endorse the fantasy of being ‘free from or clear of shit.’ Thus, to turn to the excretory body in literary works is to ask what literature’s deepest understanding of the human is, and what literature itself is. Cacaphonies is an extraordinarily engaging project: insightful, serious, self-consciously ‘profane,’ metacritically alive."—Thangam Ravindranathan, author of Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings "Kim’s readings are creative, bold and surprising. They reek, but they are never gratuitous, and they open up a field of literary waste studies that poses pressing ecological questions."—Times Literary Supplement "Kim’s book offers a fresh, fun(ny), clever, and innovative perspective on canonical texts while weaving through her analysis a discussion about life and death, and about how shit ultimately brings us back to that."—H-France Reviews "A must-read, Cacaphonies provides a truly insightful, engaging, and joyful reading experience."—The French Review Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: We Have Always Been FecalPart I. Necessary Shit1. Céline: Shit on the Installment Plan2. Beckett: Shit for BrainsPart II. Shitty Ideas3. Fecal Freedom: Sartre and Genet’s ))< >((4. To Wipe the Other: Duras’s and Gary’s Fecal Care EthicsPart III. Political Shit5. Fighting Words: Anne Garréta’s Ultimate Weapon6. Daniel Pennac’s Excremental Poetics: Literature for AllConclusion: Caca CommunismAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA critical introduction to how the Nagasaki atomic bombing has been remembered, especially in contrast to that of Hiroshima. In the decades following the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the city’s residents processed their trauma and formed narratives of the destruction and reconstruction in ways that reflected their regional history and social makeup. In doing so, they created a multi-layered urban identity as an atomic-bombed city that differed markedly from Hiroshima’s image. Shadows of Nagasaki traces how Nagasaki’s trauma, history, and memory of the bombing manifested through some of the city’s many post-atomic memoryscapes, such as literature, religious discourse, art, historical landmarks, commemorative spaces, and architecture. In addition, the book pays particular attention to how the city’s history of international culture, exemplified best perhaps by the region’s Christian (especially Catholic) past, informed its response to the atomic trauma and shaped its postwar urban identity. Key historical actors in the volume’s chapters include writers, Japanese- Catholic leaders, atomic-bombing survivors (known as hibakusha), municipal officials, American occupation personnel, peace activists, artists, and architects. The story of how these diverse groups of people processed and participated in the discourse surrounding the legacies of Nagasaki’s bombing shows how regional history, culture, and politics—rather than national ones—become the most influential factors shaping narratives of destruction and reconstruction after mass trauma. In turn, and especially in the case of urban destruction, new identities emerge and old ones are rekindled, not to serve national politics or social interests but to bolster narratives that reflect local circumstances.Table of ContentsNote on Japanese Names | xi Introduction: Imagining Nagasaki: Religion and History in Postatomic Memoryscapes Chad R. Diehl | 1 Part I: Catholic Responses The "Saint" of Urakami: Nagai Takashi and Early Representations of the Atomic Experience Chad R. Diehl | 33 Loving Your Neighbor across the Sea: The Reception of the Work of Nagai Takashi in the Republic of Korea Haeseong Park and Franklin Rausch | 70 Faith, Family, Earth, and the Atomic Bomb in the Art of Nagai Takashi Anthony Richard Haynes | 93 "Love Saves from Isolation": Ozaki ToÅmei and His Journey from Nagasaki to Auschwitz and Back Gwyn McClelland | 112 Part II: Literature and Testimony "Nagasaki" in Akutagawa Ryu±nosuke's Taisho-Era Literary Imagination Anri Yasuda | 131 Lambs of God, Ravens of Death, Rafts of Corpses: Three Visions of Trauma in Nagasaki Survivor Poetry Chad R. Diehl | 151 Listening to the Dead and Filling the Void: The Prayer and Activism of Akizuki Tatsuichiro Maika Nakao | 179 Breaking New Ground in Nagasaki: Seirai Yuichi's Ground Zero Literature Michele M. Mason | 191 Part III: Sites of Memory Fragmented Memory: The Scattering of the Urakami Cathedral Ruins among Nagasaki's Memorial Landscape Anna Gasha | 215 One Fine Day: The Allied Occupation of Nagasaki and "Madame Butterfly House" Brian Burke-Gaffney | 243 The Titan and the Arch:Regulating Public Memory through the Peace Statue Nanase Shirokawa | 264 Part IV: Reflections How I Came to Criticize Nagai Takashi's Urakami Holocaust Theory Shinji Takahashi | 295 On Rereleasing The Bells of Nagasaki to the World Tokusaburo Nagai | 312 Acknowledgments | 319 List of Contributors | 323 Index | 327

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Book SynopsisOffers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction. The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world’s largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. Beyond Hostile Islands contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the ‘tyranny of distance,’ Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term ‘ideological coproduction’ to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.Table of ContentsForeword by Patrick Porter | vii Introduction 1 1 Revelations and Comedy: The Combat Novel | 25 2 Camera Men: Postwar Japan-Bashing | 55 3 Captive Memories: Internment North and South | 81 4 The Poetics of Apology: FEPOW Narratives | 106 5 Scientists and Hibakusha: Project Novels | 132 Coda | 163 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 177 Bibliography | 217 Index | 243

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Book SynopsisOffers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction. The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world’s largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. Beyond Hostile Islands contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the ‘tyranny of distance,’ Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term ‘ideological coproduction’ to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.Table of ContentsForeword by Patrick Porter | vii Introduction 1 1 Revelations and Comedy: The Combat Novel | 25 2 Camera Men: Postwar Japan-Bashing | 55 3 Captive Memories: Internment North and South | 81 4 The Poetics of Apology: FEPOW Narratives | 106 5 Scientists and Hibakusha: Project Novels | 132 Coda | 163 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 177 Bibliography | 217 Index | 243

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Book SynopsisIn Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries addressing chronology and contexts, ending with encompassing afterword, this collection provides a selection of essays and reviews that reflect their times and tell the story of Munro's emergence and recognition as an internationally acclaimed writer since the 1970s.Acknowledging her beginnings and her persistence as a writer of increasingly exceptional short stories, and just short stories, it treats her career through Thacker's criticism up to her fourteenth collection, Dear Life (2012), and to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Altogether, this book encompasses the whole trajectory of Munro's critical presence while offering a singularly informed retrospective perspective.Trade Review"Reading Alice Munro, 19732013 brings together 16 essays written over four decades and it aims to track a perpetually deepening fascination with Munros writing, and because of that writing and its effects, with her life and the trajectory of her writing career (p. 4). Thacker introduces us to Munro and to Munro criticism and, in so doing, define[s] her emergence and contextualise[s] that emergence within Canadian literature during the last decades of the previous century and the first years of the current one (p. 18). Reading Alice Munro, 19732013 epitomizes the value of scholarly dedication and of single-author studies: Thackers own is a source of considerable inspiration and it is doubly refreshing to see how his voice grew even as Munros did. The critical reflection, a mode that Thacker employed to great effect in both the books introduction and afterword, makesan especially strong case for archival research." - Tom Ue, University of Toronto Scarborough, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 30, Issue 2.We have here a retrospective not only of a critical writer but also of a reader - perhaps Munroeâs most public readerâ| Throughout forty years and more, Thacker has devoted the greater share of his career to the study of Munroeâs writingâ| [This] is, in effect, a reassessment of a scholarly life - a professional autobiography in critical essays and reviews - devoted to a writer whose persistent concern was the act of reassessment. - Lorraine York, Canadian LiteratureThacker is distinguished among Munroe critics . . . a valuable scholarly resource. - Sara Jamieson, University of Toronto Quarterly

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Book SynopsisThe first serious book-length study of crime writing in Canada, Detecting Canada contains thirteen essays on many of Canada's most popular crime writers, including Peter Robinson, Giles Blunt, Gail Bowen, Thomas King, Michael Slade, Margaret Atwood, and Anthony Bidulka. Genres examined range from the well-loved police procedural and the amateur sleuth to those less well known, such as anti-detection and contemporary noir novels. The book looks critically at the esteemed sixties' television show Wojeck, as well as the more recent series Da Vinci's Inquest, Da Vinci's City Hall, and Intelligence, and the controversial Durham County, a critically acclaimed but violent television series that ran successfully in both Canada and the United States. The essays in Detecting Canada look at texts from a variety of perspectives, including postcolonial studies, gender and queer studies, feminist studies, Indigenous studies, and critical race and class studies. Crime fiction, enjoyed by so many around the world, speaks to all of us about justice, citizenship, and important social issues in an uncertain world.Trade Review"Writers of Canadian crime fiction have learned to gird our loins when we are asked a question that is as irritating as it is inevitable: When are you going to write a real novel? By offering not simply an overview of the history of crime fiction in Canada but thoughtful essays on the themes Canadian crime writers explore and on the roles played by landscape, gender, class, race, and community in our works, 'Detecting Canada' answers that question decisively. Canadian crime writers are writing real novels, and 'Detecting Canada' offers solid evidence to prove the point." -- Gail Bowen, author of 'The Gifted', the latest in the Joanne Kilbourn mystery series"'Detecting Canada' is an indispensable landmark in the study of Canadian crime narratives. Its range is remarkable, with the essays covering not only the major practitioners of Canadian crime fiction but also television crime shows and films. This collection will remain a standard resource for many years to come." -- David Schmid, Department of English, University at Buffalo, author of 'Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture'Table of Contents Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film, edited by Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose Introduction Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose History and Theory 1. Coca-Colonialists Write Back: Localizing the Global in Canadian Crime Fiction Beryl Langer 2. Canadian Crime Writing in English David Skene-Melvin Essays on Fiction 3. Canadian Psycho: Genre, Nation, and Colonial Violence in Michael Slade's Gothic RCMP Procedurals Brian Johnson 4. Northern Procedures: Policing the Nation in Giles Blunt's The Delicate Storm Manina Jones 5. Revisioning the Dick: Reading Thomas King's Thumps DreadfulWater Mysteries Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton 6. Generic Play and Gender Trouble in Peter Robinson's In a Dry Season Jeannette Sloniowski 7. A Colder Kind of Gender Politics: Intersections of Feminism and Detection in Gail Bowen's Joanne Kilbourn Series Pamela Bedore 8. Queer Eye for the Private Eye: Homonationalism and the Regulation of Queer Difference in Anthony Bidulka's Russell Quant Mystery Series Péter Balogh 9. Under/Cover: Strategies of Detection and Evasion in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace Marilyn Rose Essays on Television 10. Televising Toronto in the 1960s: Wojeck and the Urban Crime Genre Sarah A. Matheson 11. North of Quality? ""Quality"" Television and the Suburban Crimeworld of Durham County Lindsay Steenberg and Yvonne Tasker 12. Mounties and Metaphysics in Canadian Film and Television Patricia Gruben Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisExamines the departure from meter and rhyme in modern poetry and the increased use of free verse

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Book SynopsisMary Butts wrote and lived among notable modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau, H.D., and Ezra Pound, and was on her way to becoming one of the most respected British female writers of the twentieth century. Yet, after her death in 1937 at the age of forty-six, her reputation suffered a decline. Butt's idiosyncratic spirituality did not lend itself to easy critical examination, modernism was generally considered a masculine endeavor, and her papers were not made public for over fifty years. The recent acquisition of those papers by the Beinecke Library at Yale University, however, has brought about a resurgence of interest in her unique writings. Mary Butts confronts and reinterprets reality in extraordinary ways, and her modernist vision recalls the natural origins and powers of the female divine. Her intense dedication to ancient rites and myth, and her dabbling in the occult, became embedded in her fiction and led to her own brand of mysticism. Indeed, the Butts heroine is at once, healer, sacred priestess, earth goddess, lover, and daimon/demon. In presenting her characters this way, Butts valorizes what she calls "the soul living at its fullest capacity." Roslyn Reso Foy gives us the first sustained critical study of Butts, exploring the signficance of feminism, mysticism, and magic in her life and writings. Foy's thoughtful analysis, combining scholarship with straightforward discussion, will serve as an introduction to, and foundation for, further critical studies of this remarkable female modernist whose work coincides with contemporary concerns and who can no longer be ignored.

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Book SynopsisIn Food for the Winter,Geraldine Connolly recovers the lost world of childhood in the years ofsmall-town America following World War II. The prevailing imagery is that offire, the fire of bombing recollected, the fire of Roman Catholicism, of riflesand steel mills, candles and cigarettes, fires both intellectual and physical,fires of emotion and spirit. Connolly's collection fixes the past and itslosses in place then moves from girlhood themes into the emergence of womanhoodand its passions. The book's real subject is love and the rich and variedpossibilities of human relationships. The rites of passages become more thanthose of an individual life, achieving an identity that both records aparticular moment in time yet transcends a particular human body and names usall as suffers of experience and enjoyers of perceptions.

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Book SynopsisBen Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.In 1932, Hechtsolidified his legend as ""the Shakespeare of Hollywood"" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe's Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state.The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious! and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando's career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe's memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.Table of Contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Prelude: The Lost Land of Boyhood Part I: THE NEWSPAPERMAN The Chicago School of Journalism Chapter 1: The Chicago School Chapter 2: Shades of Black: The Stages of Hecht's Cynicism Chapter 3: Propagandist in Training Chapter 4: The Journalist and the Gangster Part II: THE WRITER The Chicago Renaissance and Hollywood Chapter 5: The Chicago Renaissance: Little Children of the Arts Chapter 6: Crying in the Wilderness Chapter 7: The Un-Jewish Jew Chapter 8: Return Part III: THE ZIONIST From Humanist to Public Enemy Chapter 9: Jewish Knights: The Bergson Group Chapter 10: "Champion in Chains" Chapter 11: Campaign for a Jewish Army Chapter 12: "A Challenge to the Soul of Men" Chapter 13: "One of the Greatest Crimes in History" Chapter 14: Blood and Fire Chapter 15: Only Thus Part IV: THE MEMOIRIST Writing about L.A.'s Al Capone Chapter 16: "Some Kind of Strength" Chapter 17: Champion in Chains, Revisited Chapter 18: The Old New Journalist Chapter 19: Time Out for Psychology Conclusion Selected Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThis volume is the first book-length examination of Said's remarkable career, providing a critical survey of his writings and an interim assessment of his achievements in both the cultural and political spheres. This collection includes essays on the Arab-Islamic context of Said's work, his reception among Israeli and American Jews, the institutional contexts of his cultural criticism, and his interventions in Middle Eastern politics.Trade Review"Will introduce students to the multifarious cultural problems that can be subsumed under the rubric of Edward Said." Voice Literature Supplement "An excellent collection of critical essays on the writings of Edward Said. Highly recommended as an assessment of one of the most influential and readable critics of today's international cultural scene." Language and Literature "The reader is a vibrant collection of scholarly essays which elaborate different nuances which issue from Said's written work, his academic position, his politics, his cultural positionality, and the ways in which he negotiates these." "It is a wonderful collection of dense and rigorous analysis, which covers cultural studies, anthropolgy, politics, literature and history." "Reading through all these critical analyses of Said's work is refreshingly challenging, and it is rewarded at the end with the "Interview with Edward Said" with Jenifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker." "The interview sweeps eloquently through major considerations, like nationalism, canonical works, narrativization, and marxism." VisionsTable of ContentsIntroduction: Michael Sprinker (State University of New York, Stony Brook). 1. Connections with Palestine: Nubar Hovsepian (American Council for Palestine Affairs, New York). 2. Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories: Edward Said's Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism: Benita Parry . 3. The East is a Career: Edward Said and the Logics of Professionalism: Bruce Robbins. 4. Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology: Timothy Brennan (University of Michigan, Purdue University). 5. Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Towards a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual: Abdul R. JanMohamed (University of California, Berkeley). 6. Antinomies of Exile: Said at the Frontiers of National Narration: Ella Shohat (City University of New York). 7. East of Said: Richard G. Fox (Duke University, Durham). 8. The Resonance of the Arab-Islamic Heritage in the Work of Edward Said: Ferial J. Ghazoul (American University in Cairo, Egypt). 9. The Palestinian Intellectual and the Liberation of the Academy: Barbara Harlow (University of Texas at Austin). 10. Their Own Words? An Essay for Edward Said: Partha Chatterjee Interview with Edward Said: Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker . Select Bibliography of Edward Said's Work. Notes on Contributors. Index.

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Book SynopsisWriting from a feminist perspective, the author examines what is it about the ""Little House Series"" that accounts for its enduring commercial success. It examines both the content of the novels, the process of their creation, and what it demonstrates about the current trends of American culture.

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Book SynopsisThis is a wide-ranging critical assessment of the cultural impact of America's longest war.The lingering aftereffects of the Vietnam War resonate to this day throughout American society: in foreign policy, in attitudes about the military and war generally, and in the contemporary lives of members of the so-called baby boom generation who came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s. While the best-known personal accounts of the war tend to center on the experience of combat, Maureen Ryan's ""The Other Side of Grief"" examines the often overlooked narratives - novels, short stories, memoirs, and films - that document the war's impact on the home front.In analyzing the accounts of Vietnam veterans, women as well as men, Ryan focuses on the process of readjustment, on how the war continued to insinuate itself into their lives, their families, and their communities long after they returned home. She looks at the writings of women whose husbands, lovers, brothers, and sons served in Vietnam and whose own lives were transformed as a result. She also appraises the experiences of the POWs who came to be embraced as the war's only heroes; the ordeal of Vietnamese refugees who fled their 'American War' to new lives in the United States; and the influential movement created by those who committed themselves to protesting the war.The end result of Ryan's investigations is a cogent synthesis of the vast narrative literature generated by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Together those stories powerfully demonstrate how deeply the legacies of the war penetrated American culture and continue to reverberate still.Trade ReviewWhat I especially like about The Other Side of Grief is the way it enlarges what most readers think of as 'Vietnam War literature.' By juxtaposing the canonical veteran novels and memoirs with those of women, former POWs, antiwar activists, and Vietnamese refugees, we gain a much richer and broader understanding of the impact of the war on the entire society. - Christian G. Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides ""This is a book that needed to be written. Maureen Ryan has done it, and she has done it professionally, thoroughly, and completely."" - Philip D. Beidler, author of Re-writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation

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Book SynopsisTender is the Night, the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald worked longest and hardest on, has not achieved its proper recognition because the text is peppered with errors and chronological inconsistencies. Moreover, the novel has a concentration of references to people, places and events that most readers no longer recognize. In this guide to the novel, Matthew J. Bruccoli corrects those errors and explains the factual details. He also offers maps, photos, correspondence and notes that demystify the writing of one of literature's most misunderstood - and underrated - masterpieces.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Jill McCorkle introduces readers to the novels and short story collections of Jill McCorkle's growing canon. Since 1984 McCorkle has written five novels and two books of short stories, entering the publishing world, as one reviewer noted, ""with the literary equivalent of a rebel yell"". Filling the gap of critical study on McCorkle, Barbara Bennett analyzes the widely read and admired output of this prolific southern woman writer. Bennett identifies and discusses the diverse characters, thematic concerns and keen sense of language that distinguish McCorkle's work. Bennett offers a brief overview of McCorkle's life, traces the influence on her work, and places her decisively in the ""third generation"" of 20th-century southern writers. While noting McCorkle's links to such prominent southern women writers as Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Bennett explains how McCorkle's characterizations, attitude of affirmation and references to popular culture distance her from her predecessors. Bennett devotes individual chapters to each of McCorkle's novels and story collections. She discusses the themes that unify these diverse works, including the tension between independence and dependence, the imbuing presence of strength in femininity, the direct conflict between the nurturing of others and the preservation of self, and the opposition of purity and virginity to sexual freedom and expression. Bennett explores McCorkle's development of characters ranging from a young white girl approaching womanhood to a troubled middle-aged man reviewing his life's choices, from an elderly black woman on the verge of retirement to a yound minister struggling with his career path. She finds that in such rich and varied voices, McCorkle crafts stories of a region no longer burdened by the past but now grappling with ordinary family problems.

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Book SynopsisThis is a discussion of the work of one of Britain's most highly regarded novelists and the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. David Malcolm places Ian McEwan's work in the context of British literature's particular dynamism in the last decades of the 20th century. He also examines McEwan's relationship to feminism, concern with rationalism and science, use of moral perspective, and proclivity toward fragmentation. Malcolm offers close readings of McEwan's early short stories, which he recognizes as traditional and conservative in technique despite their shocking subject matter, and all of McEwan's novels. Employing the third novel, ""The Child in Time"", as the fulcrum for his discussion, Malcolm explores the themes of incest, espionage, moral self-flagellation, sexual fixation, political dysfunction, and personal antipathy evident in the other fiction. He illuminates the continuities obscured by the conventional approach to McEwan's fiction and raises the question whether McEwan is a novelist of brilliant fragments or of overall coherence.

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Book SynopsisThe standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.Trade ReviewMatthew J. Bruccoli is always able to look through the events themselves to the essential fact about Fitzgerald: his existence as an artist, and not only to how it came about, but what it came to. Some sort of epic grandeur is exactly what Fitzgerald had. It is a perfect title for this book, for the grandeur is there, in the struggle to create memorable work. I fully expect that this will be the indispensable biography of a very great American writer, for the spirit of the man is in the facts, and these, as gathered and marshaled by Bruccoli over thirty years, are all we will ever need. But more important, they are what we need. - James Dickey; ""Impeccably researched...both comprehensive and judicious... Bruccoli brings Fitzgerald vividly alive."" - Newsweek; ""This masterpiece contains exactly what we need to know about this dazzling figure."" - Publishers Weekly; ""It is difficult to imagine any work on Fitzgerald and his literary product that will supplant this one."" - The New Yorker; ""Indispensable and definitive."" - The Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisThis work is an appraisal of six theorists who have shaped America's literary landscape; Stanley Fish, Susan Bordo, Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Edward W.Said and Stephen Greenblatt. Underscoring the largely heterogenous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics represent it offers concise analyses of their principle claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism and feminism. The study is prefaced with a short history of theory and criticism in the twentieth century and each of the theorists is placed within the larger context of contemporary criticism. It explains their specific strategies for interpreting literature, identifies the philosophical assumptions underlying those strategies, cites specific examples of how the strategies are applied to the reading of particular works, and notes possible objections to their theories.

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Book SynopsisThis volume provides a dissection of W.G. Sebald's fiction and his acclaim. A German writer who taught in England for 30 years, he published four novels, first in German and then in English. His work gained even greater acclaim after his death in 2001, just months after the publication of his title ""Austerlitz"". This companion to his fiction investigates the secret behind his universal appeal and explores themes, issues, and influences that dominate the writer's oeuvre. It suggests that Sebald essentially had two literary careers - as his works appeared in German-speaking Europe and then in the English speaking world. It outlines the writer's reception in his homeland and in translation. It illuminates the vast knowledge of European literatures that Sebald drew upon in composing his narratives and also sheds light on the interconnections that lurk beneath the surface of the writer's landscapes and memoirs.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Martin Amis is a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories and non-fiction by one of Britain's most highly acclaimed and controversial authors. Building on the first edition, of 1995, James Diedrick draws on personal interviews, reviews and criticism to map the distinctive features of Martin Amis's imaginative landscape - the sociosexual satire of ""Money"" and ""Yellow Dog"", the bold experimentation of ""Time's Arrow"" and ""Night Train"", and the provocative blend of autobiography and cultural analysis in ""Experience"" and ""Koba the Dread"". Diedrick illustrates how Amis has reshaped the British literary landscape, expanding its stylistic and thematic range while creating forms adequate to the experience of postmodernity. Diedrick analyzes an increasing cultural conservatism in Amis's work, rooted in Amis's relationship with his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. During his early career, the younger Amis opposed his father's political and aesthetic conservatism. But his opposition has given way to frequent expressions of political and literary solidarity. Diedrick shows how this filial relationship continues to shape the son's outlook and writing. Diedrick also identifies two complementary impulses in Amis's work. The first is journalistic and satirical, expressed in an incisive wit aimed at contemporary social realities. The second is aesthetic, manifesting a Nabokovian love of verbal play and formal experimentation. Besides analyzing the ways Amis's fiction forges the topical into the literary, Diedrick argues for the importance of Amis's considerable journalistic oeuvre and provides close readings of his non-fiction collection and his uncollected essays and reviews.

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Book SynopsisWidely known as the winner of the 1966 National Book Award and author of the best-selling novel ""Deliverance"", James Dickey devoted himself as much to the critique of the modern literary tradition as to his participation in it. A writer enthralled by teaching, he lectured at several major universities before settling at the University of South Carolina for nearly three decades as poet-in-residence. After his death in 1997, a transcript of his lectures was found among his papers. Collected here and published for the first time, these lectures reveal judgments and appraisals Dickey would use to great effect in his teaching. They also contribute to the unraveling of Dickey's art from the larger-than-life myth that surrounded him. In a comprehensive introduction to Dickey's remarks, Donald J. Greiner evaluates the relevance of the writer's often sharply worded opinions. The volume brings to life class sessions planned and delivered soon after Dickey took up full-time residence at the University of South Carolina, in the triumphal years following his rapid succession of honours. Full of asides, witticisms and afterthoughts, the sessions suggest not the pontification of a scholar at an academic conference but the confident learning of a practicing poet who happens to enjoy being in the classroom. Clearly setting forth his sense of literary criticism, Dickey repeatedly emphasizes the preeminence of the poet over the critic, the original use of language as a primary criterion for effective poetry, and the centrality of personal reaction to poetry as a measure of its value. Dickey's comments are valuable for their insight into both his own thought processes and those of the poets he reviewed, among them William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, A.E. Housman, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare and Robert Bridges.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Thomas Mann offers a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction of one of the most renowned and prolific German writers. In addition to analyzing Mann's most famous works, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Hannelore Mundt introduces readers to lesser-known works, among them Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and The Black Swan. In close readings, Mundt illustrates how Mann's masterly prose captures both his time and the complexities of human existence with a unique blend of humor, compassion, irony, and ambiguity. Mundt takes readers chronologically from Mann's literary beginnings in 1894 to his last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. She considers the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche on the emergence of Mann's literary voice, his conflicted feelings about his bourgeois background, and his life as Germany's representative writer in the Weimar Republic and in exile. Mundt places Mann's works in the realistic and modern traditions and discusses his recurring thematic concerns - the individual's rebellion against oppressive bourgeois conventions and antihumanistic principles, the need for an unremitting questioning of authority and ostensibly absolute truths, and the antagonism between individualistic freedom and social responsibility. In light of the recent publication of Mann's diaries, disclosing his homosexual inclinations, Mundt also identifies the textual strategies he adopted for revealing and simultaneously masking his secret sexuality. Mann emerges from Mundt's analysis as a writer who plays with opposing perspectives in his fictional renderings of both the alienated individual and Germany's cultural and political history. Mundt suggests that the openness of his works, paired with his deep insights into human existence, explains his stature as a literary figure whose importance extends worldwide.

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Book SynopsisThis book provides a descriptive inventory of the major components in the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. The collection documents the literary career and thought of one of America's greatest novelists. The catalogue includes a listing of editions of all English-language printings of books by Fitzgerald including proof and review copies and the collection's many books inscribed by the author. Fitzgerald manuscripts, revised typescripts, correspondence, and business documents are also cited, as well as Fitzgerald screenplays and Princetoniana. There is a separate section on Zelda Fitzgerald. Highlights of the collection include the only set of unrevised galleys for The Great Gatsby, titled Trimalchio; one of the two existing acting scripts for Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!; Fitzgerald's annotated copy of James Joyce's Ulysses; a copy of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls inscribed to Fitzgerald; and Fitzgerald memorabilia such as his engraved whiskey flask, a briefcase, and other family materials. Each item is described in detail - including title, publication information, and call number, where relevant, and explanatory notes. Many items in the collection, including all Fitzgerald inscriptions, are illustrated. The Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina provides a valuable resource not only for Fitzgerald scholars, but also for those interested in Fitzgerald's friends and literary associates (including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ring Lardner, John Dos Passos, and Maxwell Perkins) and in American culture between the world wars.

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Book SynopsisPeter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown. With readings of a broad range of her published works, including her final novel, The Blue Flower, Wolfe describes the unfolding of Fitzgerald's writing as a subtle, ongoing process. He maintains that the novels, though plain and rambling at first glance, grow fuller, stranger, and more stirring the more we invest in them. He details Fitzgerald's skill at sequencing events so as to unsettle readers and her ability to enhance motifs by not leaning too hard on them. Wolfe suggests that Fitzgerald's refusal to overplay effects and emotions, while at first puzzling in its disdain for drama, turns out to be one of her chief virtues, for she enables larger associations to emerge as she keeps big dramatic scenes from interfering with wider patterns. While enumerating Fitzgerald's many talents, Wolfe ultimately attributes much of her success to her style. He concludes that her exceptionally disciplined prose, which gives voice to her candor and compassion, imbues her work with a sense of mood, place, and character.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. He identifies influences and events central to the genre's growth, including the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.

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Book SynopsisIn the closing decade of the twentieth century, Don DeLillo emerged from the privileged status of a writer's writer to become by any measure - productivity, influence, scope, gravitas - the dominant novelist of fin-de-millennium America. Beginning in 1982 with ""The Names and continuing with White Noise and Underworld"", DeLillo defined himself as a provocative, articulate anatomist of American culture. Dewey offers an astute assessment of this daunting yet important writer's four-decade cultural critique. Dewey finds DeLillo's concerns to be organized around three rubrics that mark the writer's own creative evolution: the love of the street, the embrace of the word, and the celebration of the soul. Dewey takes the reader through the novelist's hip avant-garde satires of the mid-1960s, his dense interrogations of the power of language and the spell of narrative in the 1980s and 1990s, and his recent efforts to transcend the immediate. Dewey explores DeLillo's fascination with Eastern philosophies, interest in Native American traditions, passion for jazz, and deep roots in Catholicism.

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