Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisSheds new light on the views and attitudes of Latin American writers during the Nazi era

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Book SynopsisRace, domesticity, and consumerism in the Cold War era

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Book SynopsisThis fascinating book explores Beat Generation writing from a transnational perspective, using the concept of worlding to place Beat literature in conversation with a far-reaching network of cultural and political formations.

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Book SynopsisLouise Erdrich is one of the most important, prolific, and widely read contemporary Indigenous writers. Here leading scholars analyze the three critically acclaimed recent novels—The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016)—that make up what has become known as Erdrich’s “justice trilogy.” Set in small towns and reservations of northern North Dakota, these three interwoven works bring together a vibrant cast of characters whose lives are shaped by history, identity, and community. Individually and collectively, the essays herein illuminate Erdrich’s storytelling abilities; the complex relations among crime, punishment, and forgiveness that characterize her work; and the Anishinaabe contexts that underlie her presentation of character, conflict, and community. The volume also includes a reader’s guide to each novel, a glossary, and an interview with Erdrich that will aid in readers’ navigation of the justice novels. These timely, original, and compelling readings make a valuable contribution to Erdrich scholarship and, subsequently, to the study of Native literature and women’s authorship as a whole.

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Book SynopsisArteletra analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics - defined here as the potential to disagree - without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls ""the politics of going unnoticed,"" which he derives from an archive of three noteworthy, though under-appreciated, authors who wrote during the Sixties: Calvert Casey (1924 - 69), Juan Filloy (1894 - 2000), and Armon?¡a Somers (1914 - 94). For the first time ever, Casey, Filloy, and Somers are put in dialogue with one another to further demonstrate the unique contributions of Latin American writers to contemporary debates about the cross?¼roads of literatures and politics. What unites them is their shared investment in stories about those who go unnoticed. As a practice, going unnoticed creates space and opportunities for queer, rural, and female subjects, among others, to step back from unjust institutions. As a political discourse, going unnoticed deactivates the binary structures of biopolitics (e.g., visible/invisible, pure/filthy, friend/enemy) that divide humans from one another in the service of power and economic inequality. Though the politics of going unnoticed was ignored during the Sixties for its apparent individualism, these three writers work through alternatives to the politics of visibility that has animated political discourse on the left for the last half-century. More than a self-interested critique, going unnoticed opens new possibilities for engaging in the messy business of politics while imagining and creating better communities.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: ArteletrA al vesre PART ONE: The Itinerary of Errant Palindromes Chapter One: On Errant Palindromes Chapter Two: On Going Unnoticed Chapter Three: On Unattended Details PART TWO: The Politics of Going Unnoticed Chapter Four: A Double Negative in Cuba Chapter Five: An Errant Allegory in Argentina Chapter Six: A Nude Woman in Uruguay PART THREE: The Aesthetics of Writing in Plain Sight Chapter Seven: ¡Ay, epopeyA!; or, Filloy's Gauchos at the Origins Chapter Eight: ¡Sometamos o matemoS!; or, Somers's Mandrake Syndrome Chapter Nine: Supuso su puS; or, Casey's Wasted Narratives PART FOUR: The Ethics of Being Perceived Chapter Ten: Exposure through Dialogues Chapter Eleven: From Monodialogues to Pandemonium Chapter Twelve: Aiding the Adversary Conclusion: Re-ves la ArteletrA Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisArguably the most important Cuban writer of the twentieth century, Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) is well-known as a poet, essayist, cultural promoter, and novelist, but not as a scientist. In fact, there is no evidence of any concrete relationship between him and any pure science discipline. How then it is possible to establish connections between Lezama's literary works and the disciplines of science? How are certain scientific discoveries and developments, such as the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, modern logic, thermodynamics, or the big bang theory, embraced in the cultural imaginary of Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century? And finally, how do those scientific discoveries and developments inform Lezama's aesthetic production?Grounded in his disciplinary experience in both literary and mathematical studies, Vargas attempts to unearth the overlaps and connections between science and art, thus offering a new critical apparatus with which scholars can study Lezama's works. In this book, he provides a close reading of Lezama´s narrative works, including his two novels-Paradiso and Oppiano Licario-as well as Lezama's essays, press articles, and interviews. The author also examines the catalog of Lezama´s personal library, revealing that his poetics are based on an original and fascinating appropriation of concepts, problems, solutions, and rhetorical devices in science.Probablemente el escritor Cubano más importante del siglo XX, José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) es reconocido como poeta, ensayista, promotor cultural, y novelista, pero no por su relación con alguna disciplina de las ciencias puras. ¿Cómo es posible entonces establecer algún tipo de asociación entre el pensamiento y la obra de Lezama con disciplinas científicas? ¿Cómo se registran en el imaginario cultural de la Cuba de la primera mitad del siglo XX ciertos descubrimientos y desarrollos científicos como la teoría de la relatividad, la mecánica cuántica, la lógica moderna, la termodinámica, o la teoría del big bang? Y finalmente, ¿quedan registrados esos descubrimientos y desarrollos científicos en la producción estética de Lezama?Apoyado en la perspectiva que le brinda su formación académica tanto en matemáticas como en estudios literarios, Vargas intenta resolver estos interrogantes. Una lectura detallada de la obra narrativa del autor cubano, incluyendo sus dos novelas-Paradiso y Oppiano Licario-y de gran parte de sus ensayos, artículos de prensa y entrevistas concedidas por él, así como un examen cuidadoso de lo que sobrevivió de su biblioteca personal, muestran que la propuesta poética de Lezama está sustentada sobre una fascinante y original apropiación de conceptos, problemas, soluciones, y características retóricas del quehacer científico.Table of Contents Agradecimientos Introducción Capítulo uno: La entrada de Einstein en La Habana Capítulo dos: Lezama, el tiempo y los relojes Capítulo tres: La muerte del tiempo y la configuración poética del espacio-tiempoCapítulo cuatro: Geometría riemanniana, ajedrez y huracanes lezamianos Capítulo cinco: Paralelismos en crisis Capítulo seis: Coloquio de José Lezama Lima con los números Epilogo: El secreto de Lezama Lima Conclusión: Oro luminoso de profecías Notas Bibliografía Índice alfabético<

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Book SynopsisArguably the most important Cuban writer of the twentieth century, Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) is well-known as a poet, essayist, cultural promoter, and novelist, but not as a scientist. In fact, there is no evidence of any concrete relationship between him and any pure science discipline. How then it is possible to establish connections between Lezama's literary works and the disciplines of science? How are certain scientific discoveries and developments, such as the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, modern logic, thermodynamics, or the big bang theory, embraced in the cultural imaginary of Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century? And finally, how do those scientific discoveries and developments inform Lezama's aesthetic production?Grounded in his disciplinary experience in both literary and mathematical studies, Vargas attempts to unearth the overlaps and connections between science and art, thus offering a new critical apparatus with which scholars can study Lezama's works. In this book, he provides a close reading of Lezama´s narrative works, including his two novels-Paradiso and Oppiano Licario-as well as Lezama's essays, press articles, and interviews. The author also examines the catalog of Lezama´s personal library, revealing that his poetics are based on an original and fascinating appropriation of concepts, problems, solutions, and rhetorical devices in science.Probablemente el escritor Cubano más importante del siglo XX, José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) es reconocido como poeta, ensayista, promotor cultural, y novelista, pero no por su relación con alguna disciplina de las ciencias puras. ¿Cómo es posible entonces establecer algún tipo de asociación entre el pensamiento y la obra de Lezama con disciplinas científicas? ¿Cómo se registran en el imaginario cultural de la Cuba de la primera mitad del siglo XX ciertos descubrimientos y desarrollos científicos como la teoría de la relatividad, la mecánica cuántica, la lógica moderna, la termodinámica, o la teoría del big bang? Y finalmente, ¿quedan registrados esos descubrimientos y desarrollos científicos en la producción estética de Lezama?Apoyado en la perspectiva que le brinda su formación académica tanto en matemáticas como en estudios literarios, Vargas intenta resolver estos interrogantes. Una lectura detallada de la obra narrativa del autor cubano, incluyendo sus dos novelas-Paradiso y Oppiano Licario-y de gran parte de sus ensayos, artículos de prensa y entrevistas concedidas por él, así como un examen cuidadoso de lo que sobrevivió de su biblioteca personal, muestran que la propuesta poética de Lezama está sustentada sobre una fascinante y original apropiación de conceptos, problemas, soluciones, y características retóricas del quehacer científico.Table of Contents Agradecimientos Introducción Capítulo uno: La entrada de Einstein en La Habana Capítulo dos: Lezama, el tiempo y los relojes Capítulo tres: La muerte del tiempo y la configuración poética del espacio-tiempoCapítulo cuatro: Geometría riemanniana, ajedrez y huracanes lezamianos Capítulo cinco: Paralelismos en crisis Capítulo seis: Coloquio de José Lezama Lima con los números Epilogo: El secreto de Lezama Lima Conclusión: Oro luminoso de profecías Notas Bibliografía Índice alfabético<

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Book SynopsisCartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analyzes the poetic works of this twentieth-century Colombian writer as a manifestation of cosmopolitanism, global cultural cartographies, and a self-fashioned poetic genealogy. Ramírez Rojas approaches de Greiff's poems as cultural maps that reveal both a desire of connectivity with the world and a need for reorganizing the imaginary library of world literature. From a self-assumed position of eccentricity, de Greiff builds a network of global connections and disputes the binary division of cultural centers and peripheries, revendicating marginality as a productive condition. The study of this alternative cosmopolitanism brings de Greiff's writings into current debates about Latin America's cultural positionality within the frame of global cultural networks and world literature.Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analiza la obra de este poeta colombiano del siglo XX como una manifestación de cosmopolitismo, cartografías culturales globales y la construcción de una genealogía poética. Ramírez Rojas se acerca a los poemas de León de Greiff como mapas culturales que revelan tanto un deseo de conexión con el mundo como una necesidad de reorganizar el archivo imaginario de la literatura mundial. Desde una asumida posición de excentricidad, de Greiff construye una red de conexiones globales y pone en cuestión las divisiones binarias de centro y periferia, reivindicando así su marginalidad como una condición productiva. El estudio de este cosmopolitismo alternativo contextualiza los textos de León de Greiff en los debates actuales sobre el posicionamiento de América Latina dentro de las redes de cultura global y de la literatura mundial.

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Book SynopsisCartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analyzes the poetic works of this twentieth-century Colombian writer as a manifestation of cosmopolitanism, global cultural cartographies, and a self-fashioned poetic genealogy. Ramírez Rojas approaches de Greiff's poems as cultural maps that reveal both a desire of connectivity with the world and a need for reorganizing the imaginary library of world literature. From a self-assumed position of eccentricity, de Greiff builds a network of global connections and disputes the binary division of cultural centers and peripheries, revendicating marginality as a productive condition. The study of this alternative cosmopolitanism brings de Greiff's writings into current debates about Latin America's cultural positionality within the frame of global cultural networks and world literature.Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analiza la obra de este poeta colombiano del siglo XX como una manifestación de cosmopolitismo, cartografías culturales globales y la construcción de una genealogía poética. Ramírez Rojas se acerca a los poemas de León de Greiff como mapas culturales que revelan tanto un deseo de conexión con el mundo como una necesidad de reorganizar el archivo imaginario de la literatura mundial. Desde una asumida posición de excentricidad, de Greiff construye una red de conexiones globales y pone en cuestión las divisiones binarias de centro y periferia, reivindicando así su marginalidad como una condición productiva. El estudio de este cosmopolitismo alternativo contextualiza los textos de León de Greiff en los debates actuales sobre el posicionamiento de América Latina dentro de las redes de cultura global y de la literatura mundial.

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Book SynopsisA noncommissioned officer of the Nicaraguan National Guard travels to New York to meet the famous bodybuilder, Charles Atlas. When he approaches his hero, he finds a body pierced with syringes and tubes, a cyborg of fragile artificial life. In the garden of a Central American dictator's mansion, a prisoner is locked in a cage next to a lion's. Nature and animal instinct will take their course. In post-Sandinista Nicaragua, an amputee policeman must face—alone and wounded—a drug gang commanded by his former guerrilla leader. Despite the gravity and violence present in many of Sergio Ramírez Mercado's short stories and novels, his writing is governed by irony and parody. Fábula del Poder proposes a novel critical assessment of the narrative work of Ramírez, who won the Cervantes Prize in 2017, emphasizing the mechanisms of representation and criticism of power in contemporary Latin American literature. In an entertaining and dynamic way, the book applies an interdisciplinary, theoretical approach, borrowing concepts from political theory, literary criticism, video games, visual culture, and sports, and reviews the contemporary historiography of Nicaragua and Latin America.Un suboficial de la Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua viaja a Nueva York para conocer al célebre fisicoculturista Charles Atlas. Cuando logra acercarse al héroe, encuentra un cuerpo traspasado de jeringas y mangueras, un cíborg de frágil vida artificial. En el jardín de la mansión de un dictador centroamericano, un prisionero es encerrado en la jaula contigua a la de un león. La naturaleza y el instinto animal seguirán su curso. En la Nicaragua post-sandinista, un policía amputado de una pierna debe enfrentar—solo y herido—a una banda de narcotraficantes comandada por su antiguo jefe guerrillero. A pesar de la gravedad y violencia de las historias contadas en muchos de los cuentos y las novelas de Sergio Ramírez Mercado, su obra está regida por la ironía y la parodia. Fábula del Poder propone una novedosa valoración crítica de la obra narrativa de Ramírez, quien recibió el Premio Cervantes en 2017, haciendo énfasis en los mecanismos de representación y crítica del poder en la literatura contemporánea de América Latina. De manera amena y dinámica el libro utiliza un marco teórico interdisciplinario y aplica conceptos de teoría política, crítica literaria, videojuegos, cultura visual y deportiva, y repasa la historiografía contemporánea de Nicaragua y América Latina.

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Book SynopsisSince the release of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, Cormac McCarthy’s characters, intricate plots, and sometimes forbidding settings have captivated the attention of countless readers while exploring deep philosophical problems, including that of human agency and free will. This multiauthor volume places the full range of his novels in historical, literary, and cultural contexts and shifts the focus of critical engagement to questions of determinism, fatalism, and free will. Essayists over the course of eleven chapters show how McCarthy’s protagonists and antagonists often confront grotesque realities and destinies, and find themselves prey to incessant subconscious and uncontrollable forces. In the process, these scholars reveal that McCarthy’s works arrive thoroughly tinctured with religious complexities, ambiguities of ancient and modern thinking, and profoundly splintered notions of morality, freedom, and ethics. Consequently, McCarthy’s philosophical depth, mastery of language, and sometimes shocking psychological analysis are brought into sharp focus for longtime readers. With new scholarship from eminent critics, an accessible style, and precise attention to the lesser-known works, Cormac McCarthy’s Violent Destinies re-introduces the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s work under the twin themes of fatalism and determinism.Trade Review“Cormac McCarthy’s Violent Destinies is an intelligently assembled, thoughtful, and original collection of essays that, together, form a useful point of reference in the literature that is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, as a good collection should, this one provides both nuance and variety, and the editors focus the spotlight tightly on their themes illuminating McCarthy’s richly productive fiction.”—Nicholas Monk, director of Warwick University’s Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and author of True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity

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Book SynopsisAlthough Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird has attracted a great deal of scholarly and popular attention due to its engaging narrative and broad appeal to a sense of justice, little has been done to examine the modern classic through the lens of Lee's controversial novel Go Set a Watchman, published unexpectedly a year before the author's death. In Mockingbird Grows Up Cheli Reutter and Jonathan S. Cullick assemble a team of scholars to take on the task of interpreting, contextualising, and deconstructing To Kill a Mockingbird in the wake of Go Set a Watchman. The essays contained in this groundbreaking volume cover a range of literary topics, such as race, sexuality, language, and reading contexts. Critically, the volume revisits the question of African-American characterisation in Lee's work and reexamines the development of Atticus Finch, a character long believed to be an exemplar of justice and virtue in Lee's fiction. The editors also take on questions regarding the publication of Go Set a Watchman, and Holly Blackford contributes an essay that places Watchman within the pantheon of American literature.Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in southern literature will appreciate the new light this publication sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up offers a deeper understanding of a canonical American work and prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee's appealing prose, complex characters, and influential metaphors.

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Book SynopsisIn Off Whiteness: Place, Blood, and Tradition in Post-Reconstruction Southern Literature, Izabela Hopkins explores the remaking of whiteness in the Post-Reconstruction South as represented in literary fiction. To focus her study, she discusses the writings of four prominent figures: Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who contributed to discussions of racial and social identity during the post–Civil War South through poetry, journalism, essays, novels, and more.Off Whiteness draws from both sides of the color line—as well as from both the male and female experience—to examine the ambivalence of Southern whiteness from three particular vantage points: place, ideality, and repeatability. Hopkins develops her analysis across nine chapters divided into three parts. In her exploration of these four writers with differing backgrounds and experiences, she utilizes both their well-known and lesser-known texts to argue against the superficial oversimplification that “whiteness requires blackness to define itself.”Hopkins’s analysis not only successfully grapples with a wide range of post-structural theories; it also approaches the significance of language and religion with intention and sensitivity, thereby addressing areas that are typically ignored in whiteness studies scholarship. The interdisciplinary nature of Off Whiteness positions it as an engaging text relevant to the work and interests of scholars drawn to American and Southern history, cultural and social studies, literary studies, etymology, and critical race theory.

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Book SynopsisTechnological innovation has long threatened the printed book, but ultimately, most digital alternatives to the codex have been onscreen replications. While a range of critics have debated the benefits and dangers of this media technology, contemporary and avant-garde writers have offered more nuanced considerations.Taking up works from Andy Warhol, Kevin Young, Don DeLillo, and Hari Kunzru, Archival Fictions considers how these writers have constructed a speculative history of media technology through formal experimentation. Although media technologies have determined the extent of what can be written, recorded, and remembered in the immediate aftermath of print's hegemony, Paul Benzon argues that literary form provides a vital means for critical engagement with the larger contours of media history. Drawing on approaches from media poetics, film studies, and the digital humanities, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how authors who engage technology through form continue to imagine new roles for print literature across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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Book SynopsisInformation science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury.Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet's library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.

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Book SynopsisInformation science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury.Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet's library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.

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Book SynopsisIn the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.Trade Review “This fascinating biography of Charles Wright covers Morocco, Mexico, Europe, and points in the United States where he encounters sections of society rarely attended to. Hogue does an excellent job of making us understand Wright’s importance, his failures, his struggles, and the major contribution of his work to American and African American literary culture.”—Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s “Though Charles Wright left little in the way of papers behind, Hogue’s dogged pursuit of leads has given us the most complete documentary record of this important Black writer—someone whose queer, surreal, and satirical fiction no doubt anticipates the main currents of Black studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century.”—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary UndergroundTable of Contents Preface Chapter One: The Missouri Years Chapter Two: Arriving in New York City Chapter Three: The Messenger Chapter Four: The Years in Tangier Chapter Five: The Return to New York and the publication of The Wig Chapter Six: The Seventies and the Village Voice Chapter Seven: After Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About and the Hodenfields Chapter Eight: The Eighties Chapter Nine: The Nineties Chapter Ten: The Two Thousands Works Cited Notes

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Book SynopsisIn the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.Trade Review “This fascinating biography of Charles Wright covers Morocco, Mexico, Europe, and points in the United States where he encounters sections of society rarely attended to. Hogue does an excellent job of making us understand Wright’s importance, his failures, his struggles, and the major contribution of his work to American and African American literary culture.”—Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s “Though Charles Wright left little in the way of papers behind, Hogue’s dogged pursuit of leads has given us the most complete documentary record of this important Black writer—someone whose queer, surreal, and satirical fiction no doubt anticipates the main currents of Black studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century.”—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

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Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a late work in this important writer's long career, has often been examined not only in relation to his previous works but also as a new departure. An unusually brief novel, this book has been discussed not only in relation to the novella genre but also in connection to Hemingway's own life, with the author himself often being compared to the ""old man"" of the title. This volume offers a wide range of approaches to the text, exploring it in terms of history, psychology, sociology, and—last but not least—artistic achievement.

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Book SynopsisThe first study to bring Hemingway, Vonnegut, O'Brien, and 9/11 literature together in order to examine views about war, gender, and domesticity over a hundred-year period. War has often been seen as the domain of men and thus irrelevant to gender analysis, and American writers have frequently examined war according to traditional gender expectations: that boys become men by going to war and girls become women by building a home. Yet the writers discussed in this book complicate these expectations, since their female characters often take part directly in war and especially since their male characters repeatedly imagine domestic spaces for themselves in the midst of war. Chapters on Hemingway and the First World War, Kurt Vonnegut and the Second World War, and Tim O'Brien and the Vietnam War place these writers in their particular historical and cultural contexts while tracing similarities in their depiction of gender relationships, imagined domestic spaces, and the representability of trauma. The book concludes by examining post-9/11 American literature, probing what happenswhen the front lines actually come home to Americans. While much has been written about Hemingway, Vonnegut, O'Brien, and even 9/11 literature separately, this study is the first to bring them together in order to examine views about war, gender, and domesticity over a hundred-year period. It argues that 9/11 literature follows a long tradition of American writing about war in which the domestic and public realms are inextricably intertwined and in which imagined domestic spaces can provide a window into representing wartime trauma, an experience often thought to be unrepresentable or incomprehensible to those who were not actually there. Susan Farrell is Professor of English at the College of Charleston.Table of ContentsIntroduction "Isn't It Pretty to Think So?": Ernest Hemingway's Impossible Homes "A Universe of Two": Constructing Worlds through Narrative in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut "It Wasn't a War Story. It Was a Love Story": Tim O'Brien and the Ethics of Home "A Hole in the Middle of Me": Shattered Homes in Post-9/11 Literature Afterword Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisHighlights the spirituality and cosmopolitanism of four contemporary German Muslim writers, showing that they undermine the "clash-of-civilizations" narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting. At a time when the place of Muslims in German society is being disputed, this book explores how four contemporary German writers of Muslim backgrounds - Zafer Senocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Navid Kermani - point beyond identity politics and suggest new ways of thinking about religion and community. Twist highlights both the spirituality and the cosmopolitanism of these authors, bringing their thought into dialogue with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy is critical of communities based on a single guiding principle (be it God or Reason) and thus involving a universalizing core that leads to conflicts between identity groups. He proposes alternative notions of both religious faith (a postmonotheistic version with elements of mysticism) and community (spontaneous communities requiring no shared identity). Twist relates these arguments to post-9/11 debates over cosmopolitanism and religion, illuminating how the writers under study draw upon mystical Islam's deconstructive potential, finding divine insight in love, sex, music, pain, and beauty. Such a worldly and affective spirituality dispels associations between Islam and sexual conservatism while rejecting monotheistic ideology. Thus, unlike the homogenizing drive of universalist cosmopolitanism, these writers' nonfoundational conceptualizations undermine the twenty-first century's "clash-of-civilizations" narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting. JOSEPH TWIST is Fixed-term Lecturer in German at University College Dublin.Trade Review[A] welcome contribution to the scholarship on the works of German authors of Muslim background. By studying the philosophical insights in the literary works of Senocak, Zaimoglu, Kermani, and SAID, Twist highlights literature's openness to alterity and its 'capacity for experimentation.' His work shows that the deconstructive potential of minority literature contests the ways in which we think of cosmopolitanism and identity. -- Mert Bahadir Reisoglu * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[P]rovides a welcome analysis of Muslim spiritualities . . . . Twist's valuable contribution . . . allows a creative perspective on engaging Islam seriously in readings of contemporary German literature. * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *[A] powerful counter-model of both conventional ideas about (post)religious identities and academia's traditional way of reading (and thereby constructing) Muslim authors as representatives and cultural mediators of their faith . . . . [O]ne of the latest and most valuable contributions to reimagining Islam toward an immanentist spirituality, a worldly, cosmopolitan faith that appreciates and acknowledges differences and interconnectedness . . . . * STUDIES IN 20TH- and 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: Spirituality, Cosmopolitanism, and Muslim German Writers Between Heaven and Earth, and Self and Other: Zafer Senocak's Übergang Poetry, Prayer, and Apostasy: SAID's Psalmen Romantic Religion and Counter-Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism: Feridun Zaimoglu's Liebesbrand Between Pleasure and Terror: The Divine in Navid Kermani's Fiction Conclusion: Intellectual, Spiritual, and Cultural Renewal Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisUncovers the central role of Brecht reception in Turkish theater and Turkish-German literature, examining interactions between Turkish and German writers, texts, and contexts. Bertolt Brecht died in 1956, but his theory and practice has continued to shape debates about the politics of culture - not only in Germany, but in Turkey as well, where a new generation of intellectuals emerged during a period ofliberalization in the 1960s and sought to link culture to politics, art to life, theater to revolutionary practice. Ever since, Brecht has connected two cultures that have become ever more intertwined. Drawing upon archival research and close textual analysis, this study reconstructs how Brecht's thought was first interpreted by theater practitioners in Turkey and then by Turkish writers living in Germany. Gezen first focuses on Turkey in the 1960s, reconstructing theater programming and critical debates in literary journals in order to explore how Brechtian stage productions thematized issues in Turkish politics and cultural affairs. She then traces the significance of Brechtiantheater practice and aesthetics for Aras Ören (1939-) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1946-), two important writers, actors, and dramatists who emigrated to Germany. By shedding light on their theatrical involvement in Turkey and East and West Germany, this study not only introduces a new context for comprehending individual works, but also enhances our understanding of the intellectual interchanges that shaped the emergence of Turkish-German literature. Ela E. Gezen is Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Trade ReviewThis cohesive, well-written, and overdue analysis examines the interconnections and intersections of Brecht's political aesthetics, Turkish theater, and Turkish-German literature . . . [and] is an invaluable asset to Brecht scholars, Ören scholars, Özdamar scholars, and all those working in German studies, theater and performance studies, Turkish-German studies, and especially on relationships and intersections between Turkish and German literature. -- Britta Kallin * FEMINIST GERMAN STUDIES *Gezen's rich and informative book provides deep insights into Turkish-German cultural history, as seen through the lens of Bertolt Brecht...[A] book that can pave the path for new directions in German Studies and for a more global understanding of Brecht's aesthetics. -- Vera Stegmann * BRECHT YEARBOOK *[T]he broader significance of this book for German studies [is that] by reading the work of Ören and Özdamar in the context of the Turkish Brecht reception and as a continued exchange in the realm of theater, Gezen seeks to shift 'our attention away from thinking about Turkish writers in Germany purely through the lens of labor migration' (106). As the quali?er 'purely' implies, Gezen thereby construes her study not as a rejection or downgrading of previous scholarship but, rightly, as a timely corrective to its dominant trajectory. -- Rob Burns * MONATSHEFTE *[T]his valuable volume manages to do precisely what it sets out to: emphasizing the 'Turkish' in 'Turkish-German' while also painting a more comprehensive picture of Ören and Özdamar within their respective German communities and providing a far more detailed account of the cultural exchange and interchange . . . between Turkey and Germany in the second half of the twentieth century. . . [A]n indispensable volume for anybody researching Turkish-German theater or literature in this period. * STUDIES IN 20TH- and 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *[A]n original, comprehensive, inclusive, and engaging contribution. . . . By drawing on original archival research and convincing close readings through a Brechtian lens, Gezen offers a whole new framework for transcultural and transnational literary analysis both within German studies and beyond. -- Steffen Kaupp * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[P]ersuasively foregrounds the importance of theatre for our understanding of Turkish-German connections, and the work of Ören and Özdamar in particular. . . . [T]his book will be of interest to scholars and students working on Brecht's reception or on (Turkish-)German theatre and literature, and Gezen's translations and clear outline of Turkish politics make the . . . material under discussion accessible both to the majority of Germanists, who cannot read Turkish, and to English-speakers interested in transnational Theatre Studies. -- Joseph Twist * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *This incisive study demonstrates that just as Turkish-German encounters prove surprisingly key to expanding our grasp of Brechtian theater as practiced and theorized in cold-war Germany, Brechtian theater also proves key to revising our understanding of the aesthetics and history of Turkish-German culture in and beyond Germany. Ela E. Gezen dramatically rewrites the foundational literary history of an era, with stunning consequences for literary analysis today. - -- Leslie A. Adelson, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies, Cornell UniversityGezen's study demonstrates that the theater is a particularly productive lens through which to view Turkish-German (cultural) interchange. -- Paula Hanssen * COLLOQUIA GERMANICA *Table of ContentsIntroduction Intersections of Politics and Aesthetics: Bertolt Brecht in the Turkish Context Didactic Realism: Aras Ören and Working-Class Culture Staged Pasts: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Dramatic Aesthetic Conclusion Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisAnalyzes two groups of "musical novels" -- novels that take music as a model for their construction -- including jazz novels by Toni Morrison and Michael Ondaatje, and novels based on Bach's Goldberg Variations. What is a "musical novel"? This book defines the genre as musical not primarily in terms of its content, but in its form. The musical novel crosses medial boundaries, aspiring to techniques, structures, and impressions similar tothose of music. It takes music as a model for its own construction, borrowing techniques and forms that range from immediately perceptible, essential aspects of music (rhythm, timbre, the simultaneity of multiple voices) to microstructural (jazz riffs, call and response, leitmotifs) and macrostructural elements (themes and variations, symphonies, albums). The musical novel also evokes the performance context by imitating elements of spontaneity that characterize improvised jazz or audience interaction. The Musical Novel builds upon theories of intermediality and semiotics to analyze the musical structures, forms, and techniques in two groups of musical novels, which serve as case studies. The first group imitates an entire musical genre and consists of jazz novels by Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Xam Wilson Cartiér, Stanley Crouch, Jack Fuller, Michael Ondaatje, and Christian Gailly. The secondgroup of novels, by Richard Powers, Gabriel Josipovici, Rachel Cusk, Nancy Huston, and Thomas Bernhard, imitates a single piece of music, J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Emily Petermann is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz.Trade Review[R]ecommends itself to literary or music libraries, as well as to all those interested in the sounds and structures of the contemporary Anglo-American novel. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *[A] necessary work of methodology, refining and clarifying prior attempts at intermedial analysis into a toolset that offers much as a foundation for future works of criticism. * H-MUSIC *For the scholar of musical fiction, this book is of great interest. * JIVE-TALK.COM *[O]f significant interest not only to the literary scholar but also to the philosopher of art. . . . Petermann's exploration of th[e] literary subgenre [of the 'musical novel'], defined as 'musical not primarily in terms of its content, but in its very form' (p.2) invites us to rethink a series of classical problems - the essence of music, boundaries of art forms, musical sense and meaning, the relation between music and language - through the lens of these peculiar textual artworks. * UNIVERSA. RECENSIONI DI FILOSOFIA *Selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2014 * . *[A]n important contribution to the field of word and music studies. . . . Petermann offers a theory of intermediality that standardizes the features of novels that 'transpos[e] elements of music.' . . . . [E]xpertly crafted. . . . If for no other reason, one should read The Musical Novel to enjoy the author's elegant language --Petermann's prose was music to this reviewer's ears. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Petermann makes a strong and patient case for a thriving tradition of intermediality, and one - this is what distinguishes her book from earlier passes at the subject - that crucially involves audience expectations and reception as part of the equation: knowing the Goldberg Variations or a particular jazz standard provides a subliminal framework for fictional improvisation which a reader unfamiliar with the music might lack. * TLS *The musical knowledge that Petermann displays throughout her book is as sound as her literary background: this promotes illuminating insights for readers coming from both worlds. . . . [Her] theory of intermediality is entirely persuasive and plausible, and as such it is highly useful to anybody seeking to expand further the field of word and music studies. Overall . . . a most thoughtful and comprehensive formalist approach to intermediality in general and the musical novel in particular. * MUSIC & LETTERS *Table of ContentsIntroduction Theorizing the Musical Novel Elements of Sound in Jazz Novels Structural Patterns in Jazz Novels The Performance Situation in Jazz Novels Structural Patterns in Novels Based on the Goldberg Variations Composition, Performance, and Reception in Novels Based on the Goldberg Variations Conclusion Appendix: Diagrams of Intermediality in Selected Novels Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive narrative overview and analysis of the criticism of the controversial German author's works. When the Swedish Academy announced that Günter Grass had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, it singled out his first novel The Tin Drum (1959, English translation 1963) as a seminal work that had signaled thepostwar rebirth of German letters, auguring "a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." Nearly fifty years after its publication, the novel's significance has been generally acknowledged: it is the uncontested favorite among Grass's works of fiction on the part of reading public and critics alike, yet its canonical status tends to obscure the decidedly mixed and even hostile reactions it initially elicited. Along with The Tin Drum, Grass's impressive body of literary work since the 1950s has spawned a cottage industry of Grass criticism, making a reliable guide through the thicket of sometimes contradictory readings a definite desideratum. SiegfriedMews fills this lacuna in Grass scholarship by way of a detailed but succinct, descriptive as well as analytical and evaluative overview of the scholarship from 1959 to 2005. Grass's politically motivated interventions in publicdiscourse have kept him highly visible, blurring the boundaries between politics and aesthetics. Mews therefore examines not only academic criticism but also the daily and weekly press (and other news media), providing additionalinsight into the reception of Grass's works. Siegfried Mews is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Trade ReviewWinner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, 2008 * . *An important contribution to the facilitation of further Grass research. Indispensable to those working in the field. Sets new methodological standards for tertiary literature on the reception of a modern writer's fictional oeuvre. * ARBITRIUM *As a prolific author and also graphic artist and performer, Grass has earned both intense critical responses from the media, in Germany and abroad, and vast amounts of scholarship. Mews's first-rate, well-organized guide to and overview of this literature ... is nuanced, balanced, and sophisticated, making this a treasure trove of information. * CHOICE *This volume will be an indispensable resource for anyone seeking quick and dependable orientation in the vast body of Grass scholarship. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Mews's book more than achieves the goals it sets itself and provides a valuable work of reference for Grass scholarship. * H-NET *[W]ill be an essential research tool for all future Grass critics, having something to teach to even his most experienced readers. * MONATSHEFTE *Table of ContentsIntroduction Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum Katz und Maus / Cat and Mouse Hundejahre / Dog Years Danziger Trilogie / The Danzig Trilogy Örtlich betäubt / Local Anaesthetic Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke / From the Diary of a Snail Der Butt / The Flounder Das Treffen in Telgte / The Meeting at Telgte Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus / Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out Die Rättin / The Rat Zunge zeigen / Show Your Tongue Unkenrufe / The Call of the Toad Ein weites Feld / Too Far Afield Mein Jahrhundert / My Century Im Krebsgang / Crabwalk Epilogue Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisExplores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance. While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for once, telling it all from the beginning," is a translation of the phrase "einmal alles von Anfang an erzählen," from Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutková, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William. Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Social, Political, and Personal Dimensions of Storytelling - Kristy R. Boney and Jennifer Marston William PART I. ANNA SEGHERS: A MISSING PIECE IN THE CANON OF MODERNIST STORYTELLERS Anna Seghers in Heidelberg: The Formative Years - Christiane Zehl Romero Who Is the Narrator? Anna Seghers's "The Excursion of the Dead Girls": Narrative Mode and Cinematic Depiction - Peter Beicken Anna Seghers's Rubble Literature, 1947-49 - Ute Brandes Anna Seghers and the Struggle to Tell Stories about the Nazi Past in the Early German Democratic Republic - Stephen Brockmann Aufbauzeit or flaue Zeit? Anna Seghers's GDR Novels - Hunter Bivens The Time of Decision in Anna Seghers - Benjamin Robinson Filling the Void with Stories: Anna Seghers's Conceptual Metaphors - Jennifer Marston William PART II. EXPRESSIONS OF MODERNITY: USING STORYTELLING UNCONVENTIONALLY Storytelling and Telling Stories in Heine's Prose Fiction - Robert C. Holub Modernist Haze: Topographical Textures in Paul Klee and Franz Kafka - Kristy R. Boney Synthesis and Transtextuality: The Jewish Reinvention of Chinese Mythical Stories in "Shanghai Ghetto" - Weijia Li American Children Writing Yiddish: The Published Anthologies of the Chicago Sholem Aleichem Schools - Elizabeth Loentz A Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945 - Michaela Peroutkova Changed for the Better? Alternative Uses of the Transformative Cancer Trope in Thomas Mann's Die Betrogene and Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life - Kristen Hetrick PART III. THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE: STORYTELLING IN ACUTE HISTORICAL MOMENTS Problems and Effects of Autobiographical Storytelling: Als Pimpf in Polen: Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung 1940-1945 (1993) and A Hitler Youth in Poland: The Nazis' Program for Evacuating Children during World War II (1998) - Jost Hermand Too Near, Too Far: My GDR Story - Marc Silberman Conflict without Resolution: Konrad Wolf and the Dilemma of Hatred - Andy Spencer "Bleibt noch ein Lied zu singen": Autobiographical and Cultural Memory in Christa Wolf's Novel Kindheitsmuster - Luke Springman Narrating Germany's Past: A Story of Exile and the Return Home-A Translation of the Chapter "Above the Lake" from Ursula Krechel's Novel Landgericht - Amy Kepple Strawser Storytelling in the GDR: An Interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich - Sylvia Fischer Notes on the Contributors

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Book SynopsisEmploys research on the GDR's healthcare system along with feminist and queer theory to get at socialism's legacy, revealing a specifically East German literary convention: employment of "symptomatic female bodies" to either enforce or rebel against political and social norms. The healthcare system of the German Democratic Republic, based on Soviet models, reflected the importance the socialist state assigned the health both of its citizens and of the metaphorical national body meant to represent and promulgate the nation's political vitality. Yet many East German literary writers depicted characters ailing and under medical care, and even after the country's dissolution in 1990, writers who had lived there continued to portraysickness and the GDR healthcare system prominently in their fiction. This book offers an innovative reading of such texts - both by the GDR's most prominent writer, Christa Wolf, and by younger writers raised in the GDR but active mainly after 1989 - employing historical research on the healthcare system and feminist and queer theory to get at socialism's legacy. It develops a new approach to East German literature that underscores the impact of fortyyears of Marxist-Leninist thought on post-GDR poetics. Intertwining aesthetics with politics, the book employs the Foucauldian concept of the "symptomatic body," in this case a female character's body on which historical and political events inscribe physical or psychological illness, in so doing revealing a specifically East German literary convention: employment of such "symptomatic bodies" to either enforce or rebel against political and social norms. SONJA E. KLOCKE is Associate Professor of German Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Trade Review[E]xemplary . . . . [A]n outstanding contribution to the field of German studies, particularly the study of GDR history and culture . . . . Klocke's interdisciplinary study perfectly exemplifies the benefits of bringing historical research and literary analysis into fruitful dialogue with each other. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[A] valuable contribution for anyone who wants to learn more about the health-care system of the GDR, its underlying ideology, and the dominance it exerted over the individual patient through the lens of its socially engaged literature. The study as a whole succeeds in demonstrating the value of literature in complicating and expanding the collective memory archive, and shows the fruitfulness of a medical humanities approach to this corpus of texts. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW [Nina Schmidt] *Synthesizing historiographic research and literary analysis, [this book] offers a powerful interdisciplinary reading of the relationship between (East) German literature, social discourse, and the politics of health. -- Caroline Summers * GERMANIC REVIEW *Sonia E. Klocke's book . . ., carefully researched and written in an easily readable English, makes a worthy contribution to Christa Wolf scholarship, to Body Studies, and not least to the discourse on the GDR in the collective imagination. * JAHRBUCH LITERATUR UND MEDIZIN *Klocke's combination of nuanced literary analysis and historical context demonstrates a particularly East German treatment of illness and the 'symptomatic' body . . . . She presents excellent insights not only into the earlier and later works of [Christa] Wolf, whom she regards as a 'historiographer' of the GDR, but also into the politicization of health under socialism and how literature interacted and interacts with medical discourse. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *[A] lucidly written and convincingly argued study of selected literary works that critically portray aspects of GDR society and/or challenge representations in post-unification Germany that reduce the GDR to a 'Unrechtsstaat' (a state without rule of law). . . . [S]uccessfully claims a space for the continued critical study of East German literature and culture in the field of German studies. -- Friederike Eigler * WOMEN IN GERMAN NEWSLETTER *Table of ContentsIntroduction Disease, Death, and Desire Pre-1989: Christa Wolf's Symptomatic GDR Bodies Christa Wolf's Goodbye to Socialism?: Illness, Healing, and Faith since 1990 Retrospective Imagination in Post-GDR Literature: Gender, Violence, and Politics in Medical Discourses Haunted in Post-Wall Germany: Sickness, Symptomatic Bodies, and the Specters of the GDR Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExamines key contemporary Austrian literary texts, films, and memorials that treat Nazism and the Holocaust for what they reveal about the country's contemporary politics of memory. 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The process of coming to terms with its National Socialist past has been a long and difficult one in Austria. It is only over the past thirty years that the country's view of its role during the Third Reich has shifted decisively from that of victimhood to complicity, prompted by the Waldheim affair of 1986-1988. Austria's writers, filmmakers, and artists have been at the center of this process, holding upa mirror to the country's present and drawing attention to a still disturbing past. Katya Krylova's book undertakes close readings of key contemporary Austrian literary texts, films, and memorials that treat the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust. The analysis focuses on texts by Robert Schindel, Elfriede Jelinek, and Anna Mitgutsch, documentary films by Ruth Beckermann and by Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne, as well as recent memorial projects inVienna, examining what these reveal about the evolving memory culture in contemporary Austria. Aimed at a broad readership, the book will be a key reference point for university teachers, undergraduates, and postgraduates engagedin scholarship on contemporary Austrian literature, film, and visual culture, and for general readers interested in confrontations with the National Socialist past in the Austrian context. KATYA KRYLOVA is Lecturer in German, Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, UK. The Long Shadow of the Past is her second book.Trade ReviewA fresh overview of the difficult legacy of Austria's WWII-past in more recent works of literary and visual art and in the surge of memorials in the urban space. -- Heide Kunzelmann * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES *Krylova's excellent and well-written study illuminates an important historical, social, and cultural era in Austria for all cultural studies students and scholars, while also motivating scholars and teachers of Austrian culture to a greater engagement with Austria's post-Holocaust legacy. -- Laura McLary * STUDIES IN 20TH- AND 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *[The book's] strengths [are] attention to historical detail accompanied by careful explanations of the issues at stake that will appeal to both experts and readers unfamiliar with the particular Austrian context. . . . [O]ften succeeds at highlighting quite compelling connections between . . . disparate works. . . . [W]ill be of interest to teachers and scholars of Austria, memory studies, and memorial culture. -- Jack Davis * MONATSHEFTE *Krylova masterfully handles [her] subject matter . . . . On aesthetics, history, and politics after 1986, she appears to have read everything. . . . [She] devotes [her] final chapter to memorials and memorial projects . . . . A fascinating study of these memorials, and post-Waldheim artistic engagement in Austria, [this book] is also a tribute to the artists who continue to find new ways to make the past an irritation to the present. -- Michael Burri * AUSTRIAN HISTORY YEARBOOK *2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title * . *Informative and readable, the book is of both scholarly and general appeal. -- Andrea Capovilla * AUSTRIAN STUDIES *Krylova's essays are thoroughly researched, lucidly written, and should be of interest to students of cultural studies and history. -- Edward T. Larkin * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Katya Krylova's excellent new book was completed between the [Austrian] presidential and national polls [of 2016 and 2017]. . . . Krylova's introduction gives an excellent overview of the diverse strands of activity; her five chapters offer detailed analyses of particular works. . . . Krylova is able to develop a fascinating narrative. -- Joachim Whaley * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *[A] fascinating study . . . . [A] must read for all scholars interested in Austrian literature, film, and culture. -- Joseph W. Moser * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *Timely. -- Áine McMurtry * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Krylova's carefully researched The Long Shadow of the Past is a must-read for Austrian memory study scholars. It captures profoundly interconnected worlds of memory, trauma, and repression of the past with politics, culture, history, and family histories; it recognizes both progress and setbacks in Austria's reckoning with its past; and it invites an open dialogue about cultural memory. -- Eva Kuttenberg * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *Krylova has produced a timely, informative, engaging, and well-written treatise on Austria's ongoing memory struggles. [It] would be informative and digestible reading for students in a course on the topic, and should be of interest to all scholars concerned with how Austria and other nations confront the long shadow of the past. -- Sharon Weiner * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Krylova's book is a timely and welcome addition to various fields of study, among them, memory studies, Holocaust studies and Austrian cultural studies. Krylova's analyses demonstrate what happens when trauma and repressed national history continue unresolved. -- Nicole Calian * THE INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR *This is a well-considered study of Austrian Holocaust denial and the ways in which film, literature, and memorial images have led the nation toward a complete understanding of its share of guilt in the events of WWII. . . . Highly recommended. -- E.G. Wickersham * CHOICE *Krylova skillfully weaves together the historical context with pertinent case studies. . . . [C]omprehensive . . . a welcome addition to academic and personal libraries. Krylova provides a valuable resource for those unfamiliar with the political events and the texts and at the same time points to directions for fruitful future research. -- Jacqueline Vansant * COLLOQUIA GERMANICA *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Confrontations with the Past Melancholy Journeys to the Past: The Films of Ruth Beckermann Reconstructing a Home: Nostalgia in Anna Mitgutsch's Haus der Kindheit Silencing the Past: Margarete Heinrich's and Eduard Erne's Totschweigen and Elfriede Jelinek's Rechnitz (Der Wurgeengel) Historicizing the Waldheim Affair: Robert Schindel's Der Kalte Missing Images: Memorials and Memorial Projects in Contemporary Vienna Conclusion: Living with Shadows Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisExamines the heightened role of politics in contemporary German and Austrian cultural productions and institutions and what it means for German Studies. As debates about Europe, migration, resurgent nationalism, and neoliberalism intensify in Germany and Austria, politics has gained particular prominence in cultural production and cultural institutions. How does this development affect German Studies as a discipline and a practice? Volume 14 of Edinburgh German Yearbook examines political or politicized aspects of contemporary life that have become increasingly significant for culture today. The contributions gathered here offer engaging readings of contemporary literary texts (including work by Saša Stanišić, Anke Stelling, and Timur Vermes), films (by Fatih Akın, Ruth Beckermann, and Andreas Dresen), and other forms of cultural intervention (the polemics of Max Czollek and Oliver Polak, and the activism of the left-feminist group Burschenschaft Hysteria). These encourage us to consider how communities are being (re)shaped by current political and social crises, antagonisms around memory cultures, questions of European identity, as well as challenges to the status of an assumed Leitkultur and the discourse of integration.Trade Review[E]leven varied, lively, and often controversial essays . . . . This collection . . . should do an admirable job of informing readers and stimulating further exploration of recent cultural and political developments in Germany and Austria. -- Pamela S. Saur * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction Frauke Matthes, Dora Osborne, and Katya Krylova Writing the European Refugee Crisis: Timur Vermes' Die Hungrigen und die Satten (2018) Linda Shortt Pluralized Selves and the Postmigrant Sublime: Isolde Charim's Ich und die Anderen (2018) and Wolfgang Fischer's STYX (2018) Teresa Ludden "Never an innocent game": The Center for Political Beauty and "Search for us!" Mary Cosgrove Irreconcilable Differences: The Politics of Bad Feelings in Contemporary German Jewish Culture Maria Roca Lizarazu Geography, Identity, and Politics in Saša Stanišić's Vor dem Fest (2014) Myrto Aspioti Precarious Narration in Anke Stelling's Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018) Stephanie Gleißner Limited Editions: Politics of Liveness at the Berliner Theatertreffen, 2017-19 Katie Hawthorne The Akın Effect: Fatih Akın's Cultural-Symbolic Capital and the Postmigrant Theater Lizzie Stewart Goodbye, Sonnenallee, Or How Gundermann (2018) Got Lost in the Cinema of Others Evelyn Preuss Ruth Beckermann's Reckoning with Kurt Waldheim: Unzugehörig: Österreicher und Juden nach 1945 (1989) and Waldheims Walzer (2018) Joseph W. Moser Burschenschaft Hysteria: Exposing Nationalist Gender Roles in Contemporary Austrian Politics Regine Klimpfinger and Elisabeth Koenigshofe Notes on the Contributors

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Book SynopsisThe first book to examine the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre, which is especially timely in light of current concerns about male privilege. Günter Grass (1927-2015) was a fixture at the heart of German cultural life, a self-styled spokesman of the Kulturnation (cultural nation) who imagined it linking him to canonical male literary figures and their authority. He was also the object of valid feminist criticism: a rigid conception of gender permeates his works, belying his professed skepticism toward ideologies. A heterosexual male, Grass lent his representative persona a natural veneer by appropriating his era's gendered discursive constructs, including Heimat, the Bildungsroman, and narratives about German wartime victims and perpetrators. Such appropriation elevated his remembering artist's masculinity above that of the status quo's defenders and exploiters of memory. This book is the first to evaluate the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre and its legacy in light of current concerns about male privilege. It highlights his breakthrough novel The Tin Drum (1959) and his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006). The former establishes the gendered persona that Grass would develop in subsequent decades to relate contemporary issues to Nazi-era memories. The latter reclaims the novel's autobiographical material but fails to account for his decades-long silence about having served in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Instead, it foregrounds his mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery.Trade ReviewTimothy Malchow's study is a noteworthy, timely and needed contribution to the existing scholarship on Grass as it approaches his oeuvre through the lens of memory and gender, two concepts that are - so Malchow's core argument - inextricably linked in Grass's works. -- MONATSHEFTEMalchow's book is original, even ground-breaking, in showing how Grass draws on two fundamentally German modes of discourse, the Bildungsroman and the Heimat motif (often enacted in another prose genre, the Heimatroman) to shape his narratives and guide his exploration of German memory, particularly as it relates to the question of guilt and innocence, victimhood and perpetration, with respect to the period of National Socialist rule. . . . [The book] constitutes a noteworthy contribution to Grass scholarship . . . . Excellent . . . . -- John Pizer * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Including admirably researched considerations of literary genres, education, homeland (Heimat), memory, trauma, and sexuality, this is a multifaceted and satisfying portrait of the literary artist as a man. -- J. M. Jeep * CHOICE *Throughout his book, Malchow makes a strong case for the connection between gender-coded imagery and the process of memory and memory creation in the two works. . . . By establishing the link between gender and memory, Malchow opens an additional avenue for Grass scholars to explore in assessing the author's work. -- Adrian Chubb * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations, Translations, and Transcriptions Introduction Grass's Biography in Context: 1927-1959 Corporeal Memory, Trauma, and Art in The Tin Drum Bildung, Heimat, and Gendered Modes of German Memory in The Tin Drum A Patriarchal Arbiter of German Cultural Memory and His Feminized Others: Leveling Bildung, Opening Heimat, and Championing Art from the 1960s to the New Millennium Grass's Early Life Once Again: Broken Silence, Mourning, and Gendered Approaches to Memory in Peeling the Onion Epilogue Works Cited

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Book SynopsisShows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined the concept of Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism. The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, the eastern European dissident writers György Konrád, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera revived the concept to counter a perceived Cold War memory vacuum, aligning themselves with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire. Their observations gave rise to a protracted public debate that posited literature against politics. This debate was both anticipated and expanded upon in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria, and Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma, and Dubravka Ugrešić in (the former) Yugoslavia, all of whom questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism. Yvonne Zivkovic draws on space and memory studies to show how Mitteleuropa emerged as an alternate memory discourse that reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective that examines civic values against public tendencies of memory manipulation.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations and Note on Translations Introduction: Mitteleuropa as a Transnational Memory Discourse The Legacy of Mitteleuropa: Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke: The Austrian Periphery and Mitteleuropa Mitteleuropa as Conflicted Community in the Writings of Danilo Kis and Aleksandar Tisma Mitteleuropa after 1989. New Memory Challenges in Christoph Ransmayr and Dubravka Ugresi? Conclusion: Mitteleuropa Literature in the 21st Century: Revisiting the Promise of Border-Crossing Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisReveals how socialist discourses and psychoanalytic ideas shaped the modern models of motherhood envisioned by left-wing and socially critical women writers working in the Weimar press and literary spheres. Women's experiences and opportunities in the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) were shaped by tensions between advances in women's rights and widespread adherence to conservative notions of gender roles and women's maternal duty. This book explores these tensions, which were particularly pronounced on the political left, by analyzing socialist and socially critical women writers' interventions in contemporary debates on gender and women's role in society. For women in Weimar Germany, writing represented a subversive medium through which they could individualize reproductive politics and imagine modern models of mothering. Relatable and aspirational mothering practices and mother figures feature in the literary and journalistic texts examined in this book. Theoretical and instructional works (by Alice Rühle-Gerstel and Henny Schumacher) and examples from the Social Democratic women's magazine Frauenwelt demonstrate how women writers adopted and adapted emerging psychological ideas to position their texts as modern and authoritative. A close analysis of critically neglected didactic texts (by Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Maria Leitner, Elfriede Brüning, and Else Kienle) and socially critical popular fiction (by Irmgard Keun, Vicki Baum, and Gabriele Tergit) exposes how women writers envisaged models of motherhood and family that were compatible with their political beliefs and modern lifestyles. This book reveals a pragmatic discourse that advocated progressive policies regarding reproductive choice and the rights of single mothers while leaving notions of women's maternal nature and duty largely unchallenged.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1: The Psychology and Politics of Mothering: Alice Rühle-Gerstel's Das Frauenproblem der Gegenwart 2: Women's Rights and Responsibilities as Mothers: Perspectives from the Left-Wing Women's Press and Non-Fiction Writing 3: Women's Literary Interventions in Abortion Debates 4: Family and Politics in Communist Didactic Fiction 5: Intergenerational Tensions and New Women as Mothers in Popular Fiction Conclusions Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisBharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple Languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers--Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford--came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological Complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.

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Book SynopsisSince its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction--namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King. Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back. Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership--the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.Trade ReviewUnderstanding David Foster Wallace places incisive close readings in a rich context that Wallace's fiction emerged from and shaped—including literary postmodernism, popular culture, philosophies of language, politics, and ethics—to create an overview that is as accessible as it is illuminating. An excellent place to start and return to for scholars, teachers, students, and all readers of Wallace's challenging work." —Mary K. Holland, State University of New York, New Paltz

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Book SynopsisSince its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction--namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King.Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership- the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.Trade ReviewUnderstanding David Foster Wallace places incisive close readings in a rich context that Wallace's fiction emerged from and shaped?including literary postmodernism, popular culture, philosophies of language, politics, and ethics?to create an overview that is as accessible as it is illuminating. An excellent place to start and return to for scholars, teachers, students, and all readers of Wallace's challenging work.- Mary K. Holland, State University of New York, New Paltz;""Understanding David Foster Wallace is the first critical study of Wallace that I ever got my hands on and it remains a wonderful introduction to his work. Boswell writes on Wallace with clarity, precision, and a graceful authority. Readers will come away with a firm grasp of Wallace's major themes and aesthetic concerns.""- Ralph Clare, Boise State University;""Boswell reads like a novelist and a critic, with a sensitivity to craft and narrative design married to a lucid and eclectic grasp of Wallace's myriad theoretical and intellectual contexts. If you read just one book about Wallace's fiction, this is the study to read.""- Stephen Burn, University of Glasgow;""This welcome edition builds impressively on Boswell's seminal work in its previous incarnations. The volume is rounded out by two chapters on Oblivion and The Pale King, making it a complete and cohesive guide to Wallace's oeuvre. Managing to balance astute observation and accessible style, Understanding David Foster Wallace is indispensable for seasoned scholars and new readers alike.""- Clare Hayes-Brady, University College Dublin

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Book SynopsisThe winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author's deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood.A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "the adulterous society" in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation--not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

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Book SynopsisA writer described as a ""Jew in search of a fatherland"" and a ""wanderer in flight toward a tragic end,"" the Austrian writer Joseph Roth (1894-1939) spent his life in pursuit of a national and cultural identity and his final years writing in fervent opposition to the Third Reich. In this introduction to Roth's novels, which include Job and The Radetzky March, Sidney Rosenfeld demonstrates how the experience of homelessness not only shaped Roth's life but also decisively defined his body of work. Rosenfeld suggests that more than any other component of Roth's varied fiction, his skillful portrayals of uprootedness and the search for home explain his international appeal, which has grown in recent decades with the translation of his works into English.Rosenfeld examines Roth's obsession with the question of belonging, tracing it to his boyhood in the Slavic-Jewish Austrian Crown land of Galicia. Illustrating how Roth's quest determined his most typical themes and gave rise to the Jewish-Slavic melancholy that permeates his narratives, Rosenfeld includes readings of the early novels. Through this fiction Roth quickly established his reputation as a literary chronicler of both the final years of the Habsburg monarchy and the lost world of East European Jewry.Rosenfeld describes Roth's flight from Berlin upon Hitler's ascent to power in January 1933, and his precarious existence as an exile. While copies of Roth's works went up in flames in Nazi book burnings, the novelist moved from one European city to another, living in hotels and writing at cafe tables. From the time of his exile until his death in Paris just months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Roth produced six novels, as well as shorter works of fiction and a steady flow of journalism denouncing the Third Reich. Rosenfeld's critical readings of the novels written during Roth's exile connect them with the novelist's prescient estimate of Hitler's intentions and his own longing for a sovereign Austria.Trade ReviewThoughtful and carefully written … a useful, up-to-date guide to Roth Scholarship."—German Studies Review"Rosenfeld explores the causes of Roth's apartness and alienation from society, his feelings of nonidentity, and the inner conflicts that led to his premature death--and in the process, he brings the reader ever closer to this remarkable writer without a homeland."—Choice Reviews"Rosenfeld includes not only synopses of Roth's numerous works but also a valuable biographical list, a nearly exhaustive bibliography, and a brilliant epilogue dealing with the enigma of Roth's ambivalent attitude toward his Galician/Jewish background and his patriotism-engendered attraction to Catholicism."—World Literature Today

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Book SynopsisIn 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine and frequently defy accepted notions of truth.Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture.Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

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Book SynopsisA panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated—and controversial—authors of the twentieth centuryPhilip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018, he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In Understanding Philip Roth, Matthew A. Shipe provides a brief biographical sketch followed by an illuminating and accessible reading of Roth's novels, illustrating how the writer constructed one of the richest bodies of work in American letters, capturing the absurdities, contradictions, and turmoil that shaped the United States in the six decades following the Second World War.Questions of Jewish American identity, the irrationality of male sexual desire, the nature of the American experiment—these are a few of the central concerns that run throughout Roth's oeuvre, and across which his early and late novels speak to one another. Moreover, Shipe considers how Roth's fiction engaged with its historical moment, providing a broader context for understanding how his novels address the changes that transformed American culture during his lifetime.

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Book SynopsisA panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated—and controversial—authors of the twentieth centuryPhilip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018, he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In Understanding Philip Roth, Matthew A. Shipe provides a brief biographical sketch followed by an illuminating and accessible reading of Roth's novels, illustrating how the writer constructed one of the richest bodies of work in American letters, capturing the absurdities, contradictions, and turmoil that shaped the United States in the six decades following the Second World War.Questions of Jewish American identity, the irrationality of male sexual desire, the nature of the American experiment—these are a few of the central concerns that run throughout Roth's oeuvre, and across which his early and late novels speak to one another. Moreover, Shipe considers how Roth's fiction engaged with its historical moment, providing a broader context for understanding how his novels address the changes that transformed American culture during his lifetime.

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Book SynopsisA new preface covers Mamet's most recent plays and nonfiction writingUnderstanding David Mamet analyzes the broad range of David Mamet's plays and places them in the context of his career as a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction prose, as well as drama. In addition to playwriting and directing for the theater, Mamet also writes, directs, and produces for film and television, and he writes essays, fiction, poetry, and even children's books. Author Brenda Murphy centers her discussion around Mamet's most significant plays—Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Edmond, The Woods, Lakeboat, Boston Marriage, and The Duck Variations—as well as his three novels—The Village, The Old Religion, and Wilson. Murphy also notes how Mamet's one-act and less known plays provide important context for the major plays and help to give a fuller sense of the scope of his art. In her new preface, Murphy provides an overview of Mamet's plays, fiction, and essays in the 2010s and the continued move to the right in his political and cultural thinking.

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Book SynopsisAn engaging study of Black Feminism as expressed through literature written by and about Black girlsIn Light and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation, author Janaka Lewis examines Black girlhood in American literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The representation of Black girlhood in contemporary literature has long remained underexplored. Through this literary history of "Black Girl Magic," Lewis offers one of the first studies in this rapidly growing field of study. Light and Legacies poignantly showcases the activist dimensions of creative literature through work by women writers such as Toni Morrison and Toni Cade. As vectors of protest, these stories reflect historical events while also creating an enduring space of liberation and expression. The book provides didactic and reflective portrayals of the Black experience—an experience which has long been misunderstood. In a work both enlightening and personal, Lewis brilliantly weaves accounts of her own journey in conjunction with the liberating stories that shaped her and so many others.

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