Literary studies: fiction Books

Book SynopsisIn Stanley Corngold's view, the themes and strategies of Kafka's fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka's work in light of the necessity of form, which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka's art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka's rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka's distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka's fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejectsTrade ReviewThe remarkable convergence of form and content in this book brings it close to a work of art. -- Steven Taubeneck * German Quarterly *For those readers who have admired Stanley Corngold’s essays on Kafka this volume will be particularly welcome. It collects his work on Kafka written over the past two decades. Corngold is at all times concerned with the issue of writing and often with figures (metaphor, chiasmus) at work in Kafka’s prose. This single-mindedness of purpose produces a coherence in the volume and enables Corngold to do what he does best: rhetorical and philosophical analysis of specific words and passages and their implications for Kafka’s fictional logic. -- Robert C. Holub * Comparative Literature *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Hunting Nature, Thomas P. Hodge explores Ivan Turgenev''s relationship to nature through his conception, description, and practice of huntingthe most unquenchable passion of his life. Informed by an ecocritical perspective, Hodge takes an approach that is equal parts interpretive and documentarian, grounding his observations thoroughly in Russian cultural and linguistic context and a wide range of Turgenev''s fiction, poetry, correspondence, and other writings. Included within the book are some of Turgenev''s important writings on naturenever previously translated into English. Turgenev, who is traditionally identified as a chronicler of Russia''s ideological struggles, is presented in Hunting Nature as an expert naturalist whose intimate knowledge of flora and fauna deeply informed his view of philosophy, politics, and the role of literature in society. Ultimately, Hodge argues that we stand to learn a great deal about Turgenev''s thought and complex literarTrade ReviewTurgenev (1818–83) was a passionate, lifelong hunter, and in this scholarly work, Hodge (Wellesley College) argues that hunting greatly affected Turgenev's work. In making his case, Hodge thoroughly examines Turgenev's writings—mainly novels and short fiction but also other types, such as prose poems and letters. * Choice *A new book on Ivan Turgenev, a writer who has recently been a focus of renewed scholarly attention, is bound to excite interest. That is all the more the case for Thomas Hodge's monograph, which is elegantly written, beautifully produced, lovingly illustrated, and ambitious in its overarching claim. * The Russian Review *Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World is, quite simply, the best analysis of Turgenev yet written. It captures his essence, it is also, incidentally, a fascinating history of Russian field sports. At its core, however, Hunting Nature addresses one of the central preoccupations of our time: humanity's engagement with, and alienation from, the natural world. Most of us in today's climate live detached from the land, and many of today's intelligentsia, presumably a majority, would regard with abhorrence the hunting of animals for pleasure. For these reasons we have tended to overlook Turgenev's hunting and to get his writing fundamentally wrong. In Hodge's words, 'if we ignore the gun, we will remain partially deaf to the lyre.' Precisely because I am not a hunting person, I know I shall treasure Thomas P. Hodge's book and return to it as a guide not only to Ivan Turgenev, but also to the mindset of the past. * Contemporary Western Rusistika *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Hunting Writer: An Ecocritical Approach 1. Catching Nature by the Tail 2. The Gun before the Lyre: Turgenev Afield 3. "A Different Kind of Game": Notes of a Hunter 4. Thinking Oneself into Nature: The Aksakov Reviews and Their Aftermath 5. Nature and Nidification: "Journey to the Forest-Belt," Rudin, A Gentry Nest 6. Life at the Lek: On the Eve, "First Love," Fathers and Children Conclusion: I'm a Sportsman": Deviations and Doubts

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrade ReviewScholars and readers interested in regional culture will benefit from the text, as will those who are studying contemporary entries into American gothic nonfiction. Recommended for classrooms in creative writing, sociology, anthropology, and American studies. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Middle American Gothic and the Haunt of Home Part I: Legacies 1. Life in Sunnier Climes 2. Playing Ball for the Team of the Dead 3. Springtime on the Prairie: A Middle American Gothic Part II: Visitations 4. The Promise of New Blood 5. Pitchforks and Pies 6. The Casket-maker's Son 7. Death by Mail 8. Life and Death in Oz 9. Exhuming the Regionalist Body 10. Dredge: A Middle American Gothic Part III: Resurrections 11. Ghost Players 12. Cornfield Cathedrals 13. Dovesong: A Middle American Dirge Afterword: Life after Death

Read more less

Book SynopsisMarvel Comics in the 1970s explores a forgotten chapter in the story of the rise of comics as an art form. Bridging Marvel''s dizzying innovations and the birth of the underground comics scene in the 1960s and the rise of the prestige graphic novel and postmodern superheroics in the 1980s, Eliot Borenstein reveals a generation of comic book writers whose work at Marvel in the 1970s established their own authorial voice within the strictures of corporate comics.Through a diverse cast of heroes (and the occasional antihero)Black Panther, Shang-Chi, Deathlok, Dracula, Killraven, Man-Thing, and Howard the Duckwriters such as Steve Gerber, Doug Moench, and Don McGregor made unprecedented strides in exploring their characters'' inner lives. Visually, dynamic action was still essential, but the real excitement was taking place inside their heroes'' heads. Marvel Comics in the 1970s highlights the brilliant and sometimes gloriously imperfect creations thatTrade ReviewMarvel Comics in the 1970s is a detailed, wonky examination of a significant period in the history of Marvel Comics for die-hard comics fans and scholars of the graphic novel. * Kirkus Reviews *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Best Marvel Comic of the 1970s 1. Inside Out: Stan Lee and the Drama of the Visible Self 2. Everyday Transcendence: Steve Englehart and the Quest for Selfhood 3. Crouching Tiger, Running Commentary: Doug Moench on the Margins of Marvel 4. Blood Will Tell: Marv Wolfman's Tomb of Dracula 5. Bodies and Words: Don McGregor's Tortured Romantic Individualism 6. Subjectivity and Its Discontents: Steve Gerber and the Uses of Disenchantment Coda: Claremont Rising

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book traces American writers' contributions and responses to the War on Poverty. Its title comes from the 1964 Opportunity Act, which established a network of federally funded Community Action Agencies that encouraged "maximum feasible participation" by the poor. With this phrase, the Johnson administration provided its imprimatur for an emerging model of professionalism that sought to eradicate boundaries between professionals and their clients—a model that appealed to writers, especially African Americans and Chicanos/as associated with the cultural nationalisms gaining traction in the inner cities. These writers privileged artistic process over product, rejecting conventions that separated writers from their audiences. "Participatory professionalism," however, drew on a social scientific conception of poverty that proved to be the paradigm's undoing: the culture of poverty thesis popularized by Oscar Lewis, Michael Harrington, and Daniel Moynihan. For writers and policy experts associated with the War on Poverty, this thesis described the cultural gap that they hoped to close. Instead, it eventually led to the dismantling of the welfare state. Ranging from the 1950s to the present, the book explores how writers like Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Alice Walker, Philip Roth, and others exposed the War on Poverty's contradictions during its heyday and kept its legacy alive in the decades that followed.Trade Review"The works analyzed here—many of which I have taught often and know well—come alive in new ways as Stephen Schryer puts them in conversation with each other and with their historical era. Here's one reliable sign of success: I am sure that I will read these texts differently from now on." -- Carlo Rotella * Boston College *"Stephen Schryer introduces new research into the literature of poverty, demonstrating how a generation of writers engaged with the ideals and problems of welfare-state liberalism. Well-written and wide-ranging, his book shows that confronting poverty alters literary discourse, just as it fractures assumptions based on cultural identity and political sensibility." -- Gavin Jones * Stanford University *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Maximum Feasible Participation chapter abstractFocusing on the African American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Introduction explores links between 1950s and 1960s process literature and the Community Action Program. Baraka's Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) was funded through the War on Poverty, and his version of process art fulfilled the participatory requirements of the Community Action Program. Both Baraka and many welfare activists allied with the Community Action Program also drew on a binary conception of class culture popularized by the post–World War II counterculture and liberal social science. This binary conception produced two figures that alternately incited and frustrated literary and social work efforts to bridge the gap between the middle class and the poor: the juvenile delinquent and the welfare mother. 1Jack Kerouac's Delinquent Art chapter abstractThis chapter puts the Beat writer Jack Kerouac in conversation with 1950s sociologists and psychologists interested in juvenile delinquency. These social scientists used the delinquent to develop ideas that would culminate in the class culture paradigm of the 1960s. Kerouac's fiction prefigures this paradigm, drawing on the work of Oswald Spengler to distinguish between lower-class minority and middle-class white cultures in the United States. In autobiographical novels like Maggie Cassidy, On the Road, and Dr. Sax, Kerouac imagines the delinquent as a self-divided figure, alienated from the traditional lower class and unable to adapt to the new demands of the rising professional class. His version of process art replicates this division, offering its readers a failed synthesis of middlebrow and avant-garde literature. 2Black Arts and the Great Society chapter abstractThis chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante's Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka's Beat-period work, The System of Dante's Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture's essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka's cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks's In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka's Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago's Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects. 3Legal Services and the Cockroach Revolution chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the Chicano writer and lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, whose novels, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People, chart his transformation into a radical lawyer for Los Angeles's Brown Power Movement. Acosta began his career with Legal Services, a network of War on Poverty–funded Legal Aid offices. When he turned to movement activism, he radicalized Legal Services' demand that lawyers use their expertise to challenge laws that work against the interest of their lower-class clients. This demand became central to Acosta's version of process art. At the same time, Acosta's work replicates gender biases that ran throughout the War on Poverty. His political turn entailed his rejection of welfare mothers as clients in favor of militant young men—a turn that paralleled the War on Poverty's focus on male delinquents. 4Writing Urban Crisis after Moynihan chapter abstractThis chapter explores literary responses to the late 1960s crisis in participatory professionalism, provoked by the period's race riots and by conservatives' successful appropriation of liberal poverty discourse. The chapter focuses on two texts that address the Community Action Program: Joyce Carol Oates's them and Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While these texts voice opposing political positions, both distrust white liberal efforts to speak for the ghetto, drawing on traditions of urban writing (naturalism and literary journalism) that resist the process imperative to break down barriers between author, audience, and lower-class subject matter. At the same time, both writers complicate their literary objectivity by incorporating aspects of the very participatory professionalism they seek to delimit. 5Civil Rights and the Southern Folk Aesthetic chapter abstractThis chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker's Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s. 6Who Belongs in the University? chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on Philip Roth's late 1990s novel, The Human Stain, arguing that the novel draws an analogy between the university and the Democratic Party. In early War on Poverty–era novels like Portnoy's Complaint, Roth developed an antiprocess conception of art and welfare politics, one that conceived of works of art and public institutions as products that require audiences to appreciate them on their own terms. In The Human Stain, Roth extends this conception to the postmodern academy, using it to criticize multicultural education and affirmative action. Linking the university and New Deal liberal coalition, Roth insists that both are under assault by cultural and ideological outsiders. This analogy leads Roth to embrace a strategic conservatism, one that echoes the politics of Bill Clinton, whose impeachment trial recurs throughout The Human Stain. Conclusion: Working-Class Community Action chapter abstractThe Conclusion sums up ongoing anxieties about lower-class cultural difference in the wake of Donald Trump's electoral victory, exploring the notion that the rural white working class inhabits an alternative culture hostile toward expert knowledge. The Conclusion develops this notion through a reading of Carolyn Chute's The School on Heart's Content Road and Treat Us like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves. In these fictions, Chute imagines an educational co-op that creates working-class experts, bypassing the division between professionals and lower-class clients that marked the Community Action Program. Chute embodies this notion of working-class expertise in the novels' form; she presents them as alternative histories, accessible to nonexpert reading practices. However, the novels replicate the War on Poverty–era notion of class culture, which cannot be eradicated without exterminating the tribal consciousness of working-class Maine.

Read more less

Book SynopsisInscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.Trade Review"In this groundbreaking, meticulously researched book, Stephen Hong Sohn teases out how specific formal strategies in novels by queer Asian North American writers are used to develop and explore alternative kinship networks, forms of social recognition, and survival plots in the face of physical death as well social death, in which a Asian North American LGBTQ existence literally cannot be imagined. In its theorizing of queer racial formalisms, Inscrutable Belongings is the genuine melding of narrative theory, queer theory, and ethnic studies that we have been waiting for."—Sue J. Kim, University of Massachusetts, Lowell"In this book, Stephen Sohn takes not only an interethnic but a continental approach, analyzing fiction by Asian American, Asian Canadian, and mixed-race queer authors, while paying careful attention to subtle national differences. Concerning itself with the complex interplay of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Inscrutable Belongings is a vitally important intervention in Asian North American and queer literary studies." -- Donald C. Goellnicht * McMaster University *"Sohn's book is a valuable addition to Queer Asian American Studies because it not only advances an optimistic vision of queer lives but also pieces together a unique textual archive composed of novels by queer-identifying authors that we don't see very often in the field." -- Kai Hang Cheang * Criticism *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Tactical Diversions: Toward Queer Asian North American Formalisms chapter abstractThe first chapter of Inscrutable Belongings explores queer racial formalisms. This chapter articulates three formal and thematic patterns that are variations of tactical diversions. This phrasing is employed because these patterns move away from the author's autobiographically imbued fictional double—a queer Asian North American—to explore other discursive viewpoints, characters, and social contexts. 2Narrative Endurance: Queer Asian North American Storytellers, Survival Plots and Inscrutable Belongings chapter abstractThis chapter more fully engages the key terms of the project, defining the survival plot, outlining the pivotal importance of inscrutable belongings, and establishing how these alternative social formations enable the queer Asian North American storyteller to endure. The latter half of the chapter engages in a sustained analysis of Russell Leong's short story "Camouflage," which comes from Phoenix Eyes & Other Stories. 3Inscrutable Belongings in Pathology: Infectious Genealogies in Alexander Chee's Edinburgh chapter abstractThe third chapter primarily involves a storyteller named Fee who recounts a harrowing tale in which he—along with numerous other young boys—is molested by a choir director. While many of his fellow choirboys commit suicide, the narrator manages to reach adulthood. However, existing under the weight of these traumas, Fee finds himself struggling to work through his troubled past. To assuage these feelings, Fee constructs connections to metaphorical progenitors, allowing him to reframe the sexual abuse he endured as a preteen and to reconstitute notions of family and kinship through the logic of a community of individuals who have survived an outbreak. The chapter in addition investigates the ways in which the novel critically links earlier pandemics to the AIDS/HIV crises in the 1980s. Acknowledging these infectious genealogies enables Fee to disengage from his own participation in abusive intergenerational relationships. 4Inscrutable Belongings in Cinema: Filmic Lineages in Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift chapter abstractChapter 4 considers the metaphorical ancestries and alternative social formations developed by a storyteller named Bong. He spends much of his time mooning over Hollywood movie stars, especially Montgomery Clift. In this sense, this chapter explores the novel's source of spectral haunting by moving forward into the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. The chapter further considers how the protoqueer Asian North American boy employs his imagination to deal with childhood traumas. The narrator recounts the centrality of Clift as part of an inscrutable belonging that helps restore order in a chaotic and dangerous period in which he is abused by a family member and left abandoned. Eventually he is adopted, allowing him a chance to foster lasting attachments, but these changes also come with others: Bong's relationship to Clift alters, and the nature of such social affinities must evolve for him to emerge as the survival plot's heroic center. 5Inscrutable Belongings in Hunting: Interracial Surrogacies in Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters chapter abstractThe specters of the bubonic plague victim and Montgomery Clift remain palpable in Chapter 5, in which the narrator, Michelle, obsessively returns to a period in her youth during which an African American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Garrett, moves to Deerhorn, her hometown, which is a bucolic but segregated midwestern location during the 1970s. A period of heightened racial tensions ensues during which Mrs. Garrett is targeted and then murdered by a townsperson. This moment is traumatic because the storyteller-as-young-girl had imagined the possibility of an inscrutable belonging based on the bonds she had forged with Mr. and Mrs. Garrett. The novel reveals the need to reconceptualize her life through "interracial surrogacies," a phrase that calls attention to the desire for this protagonist to construct a makeshift family, however ephemeral and unlikely, in a racially homogenous agrarian setting. 6Inscrutable Belongings in Bondage: Degenerate Descendants in Lydia Kwa's Pulse chapter abstractThe final chapter takes us to Singapore, where the storyteller, Natalie, grapples with the suicide of a close friend's son. Whereas earlier chapters focus on marginalized subjects who act as metaphorical progenitors, Chapter 6 shows how Natalie reconfigures her relationships through healing and alternative therapies. These therapeutic approaches are necessary to heal her past traumas, which come to light after she acknowledges the unexpected parallel she shares with the suicide victim. In this case, the ghost that haunts this chapter belongs not to someone who died long ago but to a figure who was born after her and comes from a later generation. The storyteller comes to embrace this phantom through their collective status as "degenerate descendants" of the postcolonial nation. The novel's Singaporean setting elucidates the transnational stakes in my critique, as these two characters function to critique national ideologies that promote technological progress and ethnoracial factionalism. Coda chapter abstractThe coda sums up the project, establishing the pressing need to recognize queer Asian North American lives and associated social formations. Introduction: Imagining Queer Asian North American Lives chapter abstractThe Introduction establishes the key terms, methodologies, and central archives of the project. Inscrutable Belongings involves extended readings of queer Asian North American fictions, focusing on first-person storytellers who manage to endure to their respective narrative conclusions. Their harrowing journeys, called "survival plots," are enabled by a coterie of individuals who are biologically unrelated to the storyteller and who together denote an "inscrutable belonging."

Read more less

Book SynopsisInscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.Trade Review"In this groundbreaking, meticulously researched book, Stephen Hong Sohn teases out how specific formal strategies in novels by queer Asian North American writers are used to develop and explore alternative kinship networks, forms of social recognition, and survival plots in the face of physical death as well social death, in which a Asian North American LGBTQ existence literally cannot be imagined. In its theorizing of queer racial formalisms, Inscrutable Belongings is the genuine melding of narrative theory, queer theory, and ethnic studies that we have been waiting for."—Sue J. Kim, University of Massachusetts, Lowell"In this book, Stephen Sohn takes not only an interethnic but a continental approach, analyzing fiction by Asian American, Asian Canadian, and mixed-race queer authors, while paying careful attention to subtle national differences. Concerning itself with the complex interplay of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Inscrutable Belongings is a vitally important intervention in Asian North American and queer literary studies." -- Donald C. Goellnicht * McMaster University *"Sohn's book is a valuable addition to Queer Asian American Studies because it not only advances an optimistic vision of queer lives but also pieces together a unique textual archive composed of novels by queer-identifying authors that we don't see very often in the field." -- Kai Hang Cheang * Criticism *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Tactical Diversions: Toward Queer Asian North American Formalisms chapter abstractThe first chapter of Inscrutable Belongings explores queer racial formalisms. This chapter articulates three formal and thematic patterns that are variations of tactical diversions. This phrasing is employed because these patterns move away from the author's autobiographically imbued fictional double—a queer Asian North American—to explore other discursive viewpoints, characters, and social contexts. 2Narrative Endurance: Queer Asian North American Storytellers, Survival Plots and Inscrutable Belongings chapter abstractThis chapter more fully engages the key terms of the project, defining the survival plot, outlining the pivotal importance of inscrutable belongings, and establishing how these alternative social formations enable the queer Asian North American storyteller to endure. The latter half of the chapter engages in a sustained analysis of Russell Leong's short story "Camouflage," which comes from Phoenix Eyes & Other Stories. 3Inscrutable Belongings in Pathology: Infectious Genealogies in Alexander Chee's Edinburgh chapter abstractThe third chapter primarily involves a storyteller named Fee who recounts a harrowing tale in which he—along with numerous other young boys—is molested by a choir director. While many of his fellow choirboys commit suicide, the narrator manages to reach adulthood. However, existing under the weight of these traumas, Fee finds himself struggling to work through his troubled past. To assuage these feelings, Fee constructs connections to metaphorical progenitors, allowing him to reframe the sexual abuse he endured as a preteen and to reconstitute notions of family and kinship through the logic of a community of individuals who have survived an outbreak. The chapter in addition investigates the ways in which the novel critically links earlier pandemics to the AIDS/HIV crises in the 1980s. Acknowledging these infectious genealogies enables Fee to disengage from his own participation in abusive intergenerational relationships. 4Inscrutable Belongings in Cinema: Filmic Lineages in Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift chapter abstractChapter 4 considers the metaphorical ancestries and alternative social formations developed by a storyteller named Bong. He spends much of his time mooning over Hollywood movie stars, especially Montgomery Clift. In this sense, this chapter explores the novel's source of spectral haunting by moving forward into the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. The chapter further considers how the protoqueer Asian North American boy employs his imagination to deal with childhood traumas. The narrator recounts the centrality of Clift as part of an inscrutable belonging that helps restore order in a chaotic and dangerous period in which he is abused by a family member and left abandoned. Eventually he is adopted, allowing him a chance to foster lasting attachments, but these changes also come with others: Bong's relationship to Clift alters, and the nature of such social affinities must evolve for him to emerge as the survival plot's heroic center. 5Inscrutable Belongings in Hunting: Interracial Surrogacies in Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters chapter abstractThe specters of the bubonic plague victim and Montgomery Clift remain palpable in Chapter 5, in which the narrator, Michelle, obsessively returns to a period in her youth during which an African American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Garrett, moves to Deerhorn, her hometown, which is a bucolic but segregated midwestern location during the 1970s. A period of heightened racial tensions ensues during which Mrs. Garrett is targeted and then murdered by a townsperson. This moment is traumatic because the storyteller-as-young-girl had imagined the possibility of an inscrutable belonging based on the bonds she had forged with Mr. and Mrs. Garrett. The novel reveals the need to reconceptualize her life through "interracial surrogacies," a phrase that calls attention to the desire for this protagonist to construct a makeshift family, however ephemeral and unlikely, in a racially homogenous agrarian setting. 6Inscrutable Belongings in Bondage: Degenerate Descendants in Lydia Kwa's Pulse chapter abstractThe final chapter takes us to Singapore, where the storyteller, Natalie, grapples with the suicide of a close friend's son. Whereas earlier chapters focus on marginalized subjects who act as metaphorical progenitors, Chapter 6 shows how Natalie reconfigures her relationships through healing and alternative therapies. These therapeutic approaches are necessary to heal her past traumas, which come to light after she acknowledges the unexpected parallel she shares with the suicide victim. In this case, the ghost that haunts this chapter belongs not to someone who died long ago but to a figure who was born after her and comes from a later generation. The storyteller comes to embrace this phantom through their collective status as "degenerate descendants" of the postcolonial nation. The novel's Singaporean setting elucidates the transnational stakes in my critique, as these two characters function to critique national ideologies that promote technological progress and ethnoracial factionalism. Coda chapter abstractThe coda sums up the project, establishing the pressing need to recognize queer Asian North American lives and associated social formations. Introduction: Imagining Queer Asian North American Lives chapter abstractThe Introduction establishes the key terms, methodologies, and central archives of the project. Inscrutable Belongings involves extended readings of queer Asian North American fictions, focusing on first-person storytellers who manage to endure to their respective narrative conclusions. Their harrowing journeys, called "survival plots," are enabled by a coterie of individuals who are biologically unrelated to the storyteller and who together denote an "inscrutable belonging."

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion. Trade Review"In this stunningly original book, Wendy Anne Lee looks beyond the usual suspects in the history of the novel. A masterful stylist who navigates between wit and eloquence with admirable brio, she often made me laugh out loud—and almost made me weep." -- Deidre Lynch * Harvard University *"Arguing for the novel as a form provoked and sustained by the vexatious philosophical problem of insensibility, Wendy Lee anchors high theory in history, providing striking new readings of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known texts. Her elegant, witty, and sociable prose makes unfeeling endlessly engaging." -- Helen Deutsch * University of California at Los Angeles *"Wendy Lee makes the bold, paradigm-shifting argument that unfeeling is the heart—the inscrutable, insensible heart!—of the novel. She does so with bravura style and impressive range, producing a book that is both memorable and persuasive." -- Sarah Kareem, University of California * Los Angeles *"Lee traces insensibility from 'the unlikely stock figure of the prude' to Austen'sSense and Sensibilityand Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'—from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe to George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth. Along the way, she blends philosophical erudition and a series of razor-sharp readings with an uncommon wit that ratifies the absolute centrality of insensibility in the novel but also in the world...Essential."––J. Risinger, CHOICE"Wendy Lee's book is an astonishing achievement. Not simply has she turned inside-out one of our deeply held beliefs about eighteenth-century literature and culture—that the novel is an exercise in cultivating and celebrating sensibility—but she has also presented us with a series of compelling new readings of some of the eighteenth century's most-read fictions....Each strikingly original chapter presents a new facet of the problem she investigates, never falling into the pattern of reiteration with new evidence, but instead, driving the argument further and deeper, nuancing her central contention in ways that continually surprise and amaze." -- Rebecca Tierney-Hynes * The Review of English Studies *"Wendy Anne Lee makes me think about what we feel privately. Her brilliantly contrarian Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel looks at what happens when the answer is nothing....a dazzlingly original and irreverent monograph." -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature *"Through her capacious research, masterful close readings, and exquisitely stylish prose, Wendy Anne Lee presents her readers with an enlightening study of the preeminent genre of fiction that the British Enlightenment would produce....she offers what is no less than a new way of reading the novel—a method that is as attuned to the expressiveness of silence as it is to profusive embodiments of emotion." -- Kirstin M. Girten * Modern Philology *"A significant contribution to the study of both eighteenth-century philosophy and novel theory, Failures of Feeling—like its central figures—will no doubt generate significant response. It is the rare monograph that I feel the need—but also the willingness—to reread upon finishing, but I am certain that returning to Lee's text will only reveal new connections and depths." -- Stephanie Insley Hershinow * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"Failures of Feeling is an absorbing, challenging, and profound work....While it may be true that the narrative trajectories of most of the novels Lee discusses flirt with tragedy and irresolution, in her hands the beauty of these works shines more brightly than ever." -- Adela Pinch * Novel *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1A Brief History of the Prude chapter abstractThis chapter locates an unlikely precursor to Bartleby in the stock figure of the prude, whose ubiquity in early print culture attests to a primary connection in the history of the novel between insensibility and gender. Diving into an elaborate, seventeenth-century taxonomy of female subjects, this discussion highlights the précieuses, a fraught libertine construction that registered the political and social discomforts generated by women's writing. Eighteenth-century English prude fictions, this chapter argues, extend the feminocentric threat of the précieuses (to estate, sovereignty, and conjugality) and import the punitive script of their transformation, a story line dedicated to the violent exposure of female feeling. The chapter concludes with a reading of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, a breathtaking novel that revises and redeems Descartes's account of desire in The Passions of the Soul. 2Clarissa's Marble Heart chapter abstractThis chapter explicates Samuel Richardson's prime demonstration of the doomed logic of insensibility in European fiction, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady. The so-called father of the psychological novel, Richardson distilled narrative purpose into the probing of female interiority. Newly framed by early prude fictions, Clarissa, this section argues, can be understood through a long-standing and deeply gendered anxiety about dualism, or the metaphysical gaps between sensation, speech, and action. Drawing on John Locke's concept of "indifferency" and Frances Ferguson's crucial theorization of rape and the psychological novel, the chapter spotlights the embedded narrative of Clarissa's life as an urban rape survivor. Insensibility, it argues, embeds a trenchant countermodel within a Richardsonian project. 3The Man of No Feeling chapter abstractThis chapter turns to sentimental fiction's man of feeling, radically reinterpreting his fine-tuned sensibility as a late iteration of sovereign contempt. In a close look at the insensible who loomed largest over the eighteenth century, Charles I, this discussion takes up the phenomenon of laughter, what Hobbes controversially defined as a triumphant glorying in the infirmities of others. Reconnecting power to humor, the analysis focuses on Oliver Goldsmith, a Grub Street writer who exploited his period's tipping point between satire and sentiment. Dissatisfied with what he regarded as the distinct humorlessness of the novel, Goldsmith turned to theater's ready-made insensible, the hero of comic misrule, Puck. Arguing for the political transformations of that figure in early modernity, the chapter depicts the "insensible cub" Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer as the fictional force that reanimates sovereign laughter. 4Sense, Insensibility, Sympathy chapter abstractChapter 4 features the figure of godlike dispassion who presides at the apex of the novel form, Jane Austen. The case of Austen's insensibility exemplifies the ways in which failures of feeling are entwined with narrative failure and how the charge of contempt so often marks a disruption to protocols of fiction. This analysis focuses on the curdled plot of Sense and Sensibility, whose stalwart Elinor Dashwood has been identified with Austen herself. Examining David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, a text considered to be the philosophical companion to Austen's oeuvre, this chapter examines the qualities of resemblance, contiguity, and causation that conduce to sympathy in Hume's account, or what in Austen's novel makes emotion a contagion, or one sister's pain feel distressingly like the other's. Conclusion: Death Wish for the Novel chapter abstractI conclude this study of insensibility with George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, a late nineteenth-century novel that draws together the different strands of the Bartleby problem presented by the book: the ridiculed dream of female sovereignty in prude fictions, the anxious and sadistic logic of the Richardsonian plot, the inevitable burnout of the man of feeling, and the compromising ethics of intimacy in Jane Austen. Eliot, this reading argues, brings these elements to bear in order to euthanize a genre that relies on the now thoroughly pathologized principle by which insensibility inflames the passions. Featured here is the character of the Alcharisi, a brilliant conflation of Diderot's paradoxically dispassionate actor and Defoe's flagrantly unmaternal mother, revived by Eliot to call out the constraints of the novel form. Introduction: The Bartleby Problem chapter abstractThe introduction lays out the book's theory at large through a reading of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," which features fiction's most infamous insensible, a motionless young clerk who would prefer not to. The analysis here draws on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and contemporary affect theorists to showcase and explain that signature feeling of unfeeling: contempt. Reframing the Bartleby problem from a picture of capitalist abjection to a fundamental philosophical problem about narrative, this introduction returns to the riddle of the unmoved or prime mover as the instigator of all motions and, it argues, emotions.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLos Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.—and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers—this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space. The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena María Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.Trade Review"Dean Franco's vibrant prose and dexterous analysis make The Border and the Line a significant contribution to the study of U.S. ethnic literatures. So much more than a regional case study, this book gifts us a comparative imaginary as far-reaching as it is urgently needed." -- Keith Feldman * University of California, Berkeley *"The Border and the Line is a must-read for anyone concerned with the resurgence of ethically informed reading in ethnic studies, Jewish studies, and literary criticism. Few scholars today read texts as astutely as Dean Franco. He does so here to demonstrate how we all live in relational proximity to our neighbors, even as constructed barriers seek to keep us separate. Superbly written." -- Michael Hames-García * University of Oregon *"[Franco is] both analytically astute and attentive to the interlocking lived realities of the communities on whom his book focuses, thus elegantly breathing new life into the practice of comparative ethnic studies....The Border and the Line is a model for those of us aiming to connect cultural representations to the political-economic realities of communities coexisting in Los Angeles's historical past and present." -- Richard T. Rodríguez * Western American Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Borders and Lines of Social Identities chapter abstractThe chapter posits a theory of how race materializes through the production of space. With reference to Ernesto Laclau's rhetorical theory, the introduction examines how metaphor and metonymy correspond to the social and political significance of racial identification. Thus the Introduction aligns the contingent formation of racial and religious identities with metonymy, or the material experience of being-in-place, and aligns static racial names with metaphor. The Introduction theorizes the terms border and line as interrelated figures of spatial constraint and access. Each term has a normative and a transgressive meaning, and the Introduction explores how and when the normative meaning of one term is in play, the transgressive meaning of the other term likewise emerges. 1Redlining and Realigning in East L.A.: The Neighborhoods of Helena María Viramontes and Union de Vecinos chapter abstractThis chapter takes on a fundamental question for literature scholars: How can readers bear responsibility for the literature they read and love? The chapter argues that the reader becomes the neighbor to the literature, and follows with an exploration of the philosophical and material implications of that neighboring. The chapter examines Helena María Viramontes's novel Their Dogs Came with Them, set in Boyle Heights at the peak of its gang wars in the 1970s, and explores the real neighborhood, including the activist project Union de Vecinos, a socialist organizing collective inspired by liberation theology to reclaim the neighborhood, from both the gangs and reactionary policing, in the name of social justice. In both examples, the chapter posits the concept of the miracle as something worldly and material, capable of transformation. 2The Matter of the Neighbor and the Property of "Unmitigated Blackness" chapter abstractThe first half of this chapter explores the Watts Writers Workshop, founded in the heart of Watts by Budd Schulberg after the Watts Riots in 1965. Schulberg created Frederick Douglass House, a charitable foundation and a physical building for black creative arts, and the chapter argues that Schulberg's personal and financial investment in Watts relocated his political standing as the "neighbor" to the Watts writers with whom he worked. The chapter examines a conversation between Schulberg and his friend James Baldwin, about the meaning of "race." Both writers hit upon "love" as the only way to cut through the Gordian knot of racism binding the nation. The chapter closes with a study of Paul Beatty's Los Angeles novel, The Sellout (2015), in which love is ironized and black Angelenos assert an atavistic claim on property, with segregation, plantations, and the return of slavery. 3My Neighborhood: Private Claims, Public Space, and Jewish Los Angeles chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the emergence of privately held ethics in the formation of neighborhood publics. The chapter primarily focuses on Jewish neighborhoods, including the L.A. Eruv, the largest in the West. An eruv is an area with boundaries designated by a rabbinical authority to constitute domestic rather than public space for Jews living within. Eruv is Hebrew for "mixture," and it involves mixing public and private spaces into one large "courtyard" or domestic enclosure. The chapter argues that the eruv is a "counter-public" for the Orthodox space it circumscribes, but that the public alignment of "Jewish" with "Orthodox" eclipses other kinds of Jewish publics in Los Angeles. The chapter compares the idea of the neighborhood in the eruv with Jewish concepts of the neighborhood in a recent short documentary, My Neighbourhood, about secular Israeli Jews who partner with Muslim Palestinians to protest Orthodox Jewish appropriation of Palestinians' homes. Conclusion: Love, Space, and the Grounds of Comparative Ethnic Literature Study chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the value of comparative analysis in studies of race and ethnicity, and makes the case for the inclusion of Jewish studies in the ethnic studies matrix. The Conclusion reviews the parallel but distinct histories of ethnic studies and Jewish studies, and explains the basis of their mutual exclusion. The Conclusion posits the book's critical motif of "the neighborhood" as the apt figure for reconciling different academic accounts of race and ethnicity, and for seeking understanding through unexpected comparisons across racial groups.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLos Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.—and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers—this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space. The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena María Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.Trade Review"Dean Franco's vibrant prose and dexterous analysis make The Border and the Line a significant contribution to the study of U.S. ethnic literatures. So much more than a regional case study, this book gifts us a comparative imaginary as far-reaching as it is urgently needed." -- Keith Feldman * University of California, Berkeley *"The Border and the Line is a must-read for anyone concerned with the resurgence of ethically informed reading in ethnic studies, Jewish studies, and literary criticism. Few scholars today read texts as astutely as Dean Franco. He does so here to demonstrate how we all live in relational proximity to our neighbors, even as constructed barriers seek to keep us separate. Superbly written." -- Michael Hames-García * University of Oregon *"[Franco is] both analytically astute and attentive to the interlocking lived realities of the communities on whom his book focuses, thus elegantly breathing new life into the practice of comparative ethnic studies....The Border and the Line is a model for those of us aiming to connect cultural representations to the political-economic realities of communities coexisting in Los Angeles's historical past and present." -- Richard T. Rodríguez * Western American Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Borders and Lines of Social Identities chapter abstractThe chapter posits a theory of how race materializes through the production of space. With reference to Ernesto Laclau's rhetorical theory, the introduction examines how metaphor and metonymy correspond to the social and political significance of racial identification. Thus the Introduction aligns the contingent formation of racial and religious identities with metonymy, or the material experience of being-in-place, and aligns static racial names with metaphor. The Introduction theorizes the terms border and line as interrelated figures of spatial constraint and access. Each term has a normative and a transgressive meaning, and the Introduction explores how and when the normative meaning of one term is in play, the transgressive meaning of the other term likewise emerges. 1Redlining and Realigning in East L.A.: The Neighborhoods of Helena María Viramontes and Union de Vecinos chapter abstractThis chapter takes on a fundamental question for literature scholars: How can readers bear responsibility for the literature they read and love? The chapter argues that the reader becomes the neighbor to the literature, and follows with an exploration of the philosophical and material implications of that neighboring. The chapter examines Helena María Viramontes's novel Their Dogs Came with Them, set in Boyle Heights at the peak of its gang wars in the 1970s, and explores the real neighborhood, including the activist project Union de Vecinos, a socialist organizing collective inspired by liberation theology to reclaim the neighborhood, from both the gangs and reactionary policing, in the name of social justice. In both examples, the chapter posits the concept of the miracle as something worldly and material, capable of transformation. 2The Matter of the Neighbor and the Property of "Unmitigated Blackness" chapter abstractThe first half of this chapter explores the Watts Writers Workshop, founded in the heart of Watts by Budd Schulberg after the Watts Riots in 1965. Schulberg created Frederick Douglass House, a charitable foundation and a physical building for black creative arts, and the chapter argues that Schulberg's personal and financial investment in Watts relocated his political standing as the "neighbor" to the Watts writers with whom he worked. The chapter examines a conversation between Schulberg and his friend James Baldwin, about the meaning of "race." Both writers hit upon "love" as the only way to cut through the Gordian knot of racism binding the nation. The chapter closes with a study of Paul Beatty's Los Angeles novel, The Sellout (2015), in which love is ironized and black Angelenos assert an atavistic claim on property, with segregation, plantations, and the return of slavery. 3My Neighborhood: Private Claims, Public Space, and Jewish Los Angeles chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the emergence of privately held ethics in the formation of neighborhood publics. The chapter primarily focuses on Jewish neighborhoods, including the L.A. Eruv, the largest in the West. An eruv is an area with boundaries designated by a rabbinical authority to constitute domestic rather than public space for Jews living within. Eruv is Hebrew for "mixture," and it involves mixing public and private spaces into one large "courtyard" or domestic enclosure. The chapter argues that the eruv is a "counter-public" for the Orthodox space it circumscribes, but that the public alignment of "Jewish" with "Orthodox" eclipses other kinds of Jewish publics in Los Angeles. The chapter compares the idea of the neighborhood in the eruv with Jewish concepts of the neighborhood in a recent short documentary, My Neighbourhood, about secular Israeli Jews who partner with Muslim Palestinians to protest Orthodox Jewish appropriation of Palestinians' homes. Conclusion: Love, Space, and the Grounds of Comparative Ethnic Literature Study chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the value of comparative analysis in studies of race and ethnicity, and makes the case for the inclusion of Jewish studies in the ethnic studies matrix. The Conclusion reviews the parallel but distinct histories of ethnic studies and Jewish studies, and explains the basis of their mutual exclusion. The Conclusion posits the book's critical motif of "the neighborhood" as the apt figure for reconciling different academic accounts of race and ethnicity, and for seeking understanding through unexpected comparisons across racial groups.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion. Trade Review"In this stunningly original book, Wendy Anne Lee looks beyond the usual suspects in the history of the novel. A masterful stylist who navigates between wit and eloquence with admirable brio, she often made me laugh out loud—and almost made me weep." -- Deidre Lynch * Harvard University *"Arguing for the novel as a form provoked and sustained by the vexatious philosophical problem of insensibility, Wendy Lee anchors high theory in history, providing striking new readings of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known texts. Her elegant, witty, and sociable prose makes unfeeling endlessly engaging." -- Helen Deutsch * University of California at Los Angeles *"Wendy Lee makes the bold, paradigm-shifting argument that unfeeling is the heart—the inscrutable, insensible heart!—of the novel. She does so with bravura style and impressive range, producing a book that is both memorable and persuasive." -- Sarah Kareem, University of California * Los Angeles *"Lee traces insensibility from 'the unlikely stock figure of the prude' to Austen'sSense and Sensibilityand Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'—from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe to George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth. Along the way, she blends philosophical erudition and a series of razor-sharp readings with an uncommon wit that ratifies the absolute centrality of insensibility in the novel but also in the world...Essential."––J. Risinger, CHOICE"Wendy Lee's book is an astonishing achievement. Not simply has she turned inside-out one of our deeply held beliefs about eighteenth-century literature and culture—that the novel is an exercise in cultivating and celebrating sensibility—but she has also presented us with a series of compelling new readings of some of the eighteenth century's most-read fictions....Each strikingly original chapter presents a new facet of the problem she investigates, never falling into the pattern of reiteration with new evidence, but instead, driving the argument further and deeper, nuancing her central contention in ways that continually surprise and amaze." -- Rebecca Tierney-Hynes * The Review of English Studies *"Wendy Anne Lee makes me think about what we feel privately. Her brilliantly contrarian Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel looks at what happens when the answer is nothing....a dazzlingly original and irreverent monograph." -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature *"Through her capacious research, masterful close readings, and exquisitely stylish prose, Wendy Anne Lee presents her readers with an enlightening study of the preeminent genre of fiction that the British Enlightenment would produce....she offers what is no less than a new way of reading the novel—a method that is as attuned to the expressiveness of silence as it is to profusive embodiments of emotion." -- Kirstin M. Girten * Modern Philology *"A significant contribution to the study of both eighteenth-century philosophy and novel theory, Failures of Feeling—like its central figures—will no doubt generate significant response. It is the rare monograph that I feel the need—but also the willingness—to reread upon finishing, but I am certain that returning to Lee's text will only reveal new connections and depths." -- Stephanie Insley Hershinow * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"Failures of Feeling is an absorbing, challenging, and profound work....While it may be true that the narrative trajectories of most of the novels Lee discusses flirt with tragedy and irresolution, in her hands the beauty of these works shines more brightly than ever." -- Adela Pinch * Novel *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1A Brief History of the Prude chapter abstractThis chapter locates an unlikely precursor to Bartleby in the stock figure of the prude, whose ubiquity in early print culture attests to a primary connection in the history of the novel between insensibility and gender. Diving into an elaborate, seventeenth-century taxonomy of female subjects, this discussion highlights the précieuses, a fraught libertine construction that registered the political and social discomforts generated by women's writing. Eighteenth-century English prude fictions, this chapter argues, extend the feminocentric threat of the précieuses (to estate, sovereignty, and conjugality) and import the punitive script of their transformation, a story line dedicated to the violent exposure of female feeling. The chapter concludes with a reading of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, a breathtaking novel that revises and redeems Descartes's account of desire in The Passions of the Soul. 2Clarissa's Marble Heart chapter abstractThis chapter explicates Samuel Richardson's prime demonstration of the doomed logic of insensibility in European fiction, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady. The so-called father of the psychological novel, Richardson distilled narrative purpose into the probing of female interiority. Newly framed by early prude fictions, Clarissa, this section argues, can be understood through a long-standing and deeply gendered anxiety about dualism, or the metaphysical gaps between sensation, speech, and action. Drawing on John Locke's concept of "indifferency" and Frances Ferguson's crucial theorization of rape and the psychological novel, the chapter spotlights the embedded narrative of Clarissa's life as an urban rape survivor. Insensibility, it argues, embeds a trenchant countermodel within a Richardsonian project. 3The Man of No Feeling chapter abstractThis chapter turns to sentimental fiction's man of feeling, radically reinterpreting his fine-tuned sensibility as a late iteration of sovereign contempt. In a close look at the insensible who loomed largest over the eighteenth century, Charles I, this discussion takes up the phenomenon of laughter, what Hobbes controversially defined as a triumphant glorying in the infirmities of others. Reconnecting power to humor, the analysis focuses on Oliver Goldsmith, a Grub Street writer who exploited his period's tipping point between satire and sentiment. Dissatisfied with what he regarded as the distinct humorlessness of the novel, Goldsmith turned to theater's ready-made insensible, the hero of comic misrule, Puck. Arguing for the political transformations of that figure in early modernity, the chapter depicts the "insensible cub" Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer as the fictional force that reanimates sovereign laughter. 4Sense, Insensibility, Sympathy chapter abstractChapter 4 features the figure of godlike dispassion who presides at the apex of the novel form, Jane Austen. The case of Austen's insensibility exemplifies the ways in which failures of feeling are entwined with narrative failure and how the charge of contempt so often marks a disruption to protocols of fiction. This analysis focuses on the curdled plot of Sense and Sensibility, whose stalwart Elinor Dashwood has been identified with Austen herself. Examining David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, a text considered to be the philosophical companion to Austen's oeuvre, this chapter examines the qualities of resemblance, contiguity, and causation that conduce to sympathy in Hume's account, or what in Austen's novel makes emotion a contagion, or one sister's pain feel distressingly like the other's. Conclusion: Death Wish for the Novel chapter abstractI conclude this study of insensibility with George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, a late nineteenth-century novel that draws together the different strands of the Bartleby problem presented by the book: the ridiculed dream of female sovereignty in prude fictions, the anxious and sadistic logic of the Richardsonian plot, the inevitable burnout of the man of feeling, and the compromising ethics of intimacy in Jane Austen. Eliot, this reading argues, brings these elements to bear in order to euthanize a genre that relies on the now thoroughly pathologized principle by which insensibility inflames the passions. Featured here is the character of the Alcharisi, a brilliant conflation of Diderot's paradoxically dispassionate actor and Defoe's flagrantly unmaternal mother, revived by Eliot to call out the constraints of the novel form. Introduction: The Bartleby Problem chapter abstractThe introduction lays out the book's theory at large through a reading of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," which features fiction's most infamous insensible, a motionless young clerk who would prefer not to. The analysis here draws on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and contemporary affect theorists to showcase and explain that signature feeling of unfeeling: contempt. Reframing the Bartleby problem from a picture of capitalist abjection to a fundamental philosophical problem about narrative, this introduction returns to the riddle of the unmoved or prime mover as the instigator of all motions and, it argues, emotions.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhile much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world. Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature. Trade Review"This erudite, eloquent, and genuinely original book, with its nuanced close readings and fascinating reassessment of the reception of romanticism, makes a persuasive case for the continuing resonance of a romantic poetics of nature."—Catherine Rigby, University of Cologne"This is a vital, eloquent, and necessary book, which scholars of romanticism and ecocriticism will be engaging for years to come."—Jonathan Sachs, Concordia University"Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature... is a fine contribution to current materialist discourse, which, in this case, engages in a critique of industrial capitalism, as Ellermann advances a 'romantic poetics of wilderness,' suggesting nature is at the 'threshold of apprehension.'"—Dewey W. Hall, Nineteenth-Century Contexts"Greg Ellermann's Thought's Wilderness is an ambitious work of Romanticism studies that explores how human consciousness impacts the natural world."—Johannah King-Slutzky, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"By providing a unique perspective on the relationship between nature, society, and consciousness, Thought's Wilderness offers insight into the limitations of capitalism and the potential for alternative ways of relating to nature. In all, Ellermann's work is a thorough and thought-provoking literary study that explores how capitalist societies grapple with the idea of nature. This work demonstrates the importance of romanticism and its ability to show how the concept of nature is fundamental to understanding the natural world."—Paige Figanbaum, H-Environment"Greg Ellermann's short but impressively ambitious Thought's Wilderness... seeks to reconcile the traditions of Marxist thought, idealist philosophy, and Romantic poetics to the central goal of ecocriticism, which is to make room for nature.... Its success lies in the consistency of its focus and force of its thesis, and most of all through the striking and welcome clarity of its prose. Ellermann eschews jargon of all kinds, and finds eloquence in brevity. In short, this book is an actual pleasure to read, and when was the last time you said that about the work of a young, ambitious, theory-devoted critic?"—Onno Oerlemans, Modern Philology"Greg Ellermann's Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature contributes to the ever-vibrant field of Romantic ecocriticism with a provocative combination of critical theory and Romantic poetics."—Eric Gidal, The Wordsworth Circle"[An] incisive and sophisticated book.... Ellerman's poetics of wilderness—defined by 'withdrawal' and a 'consent to distance'—offers a notable precedent for contemporary practices of rewilding, which involve both active management and careful withdrawal, an act of 'letting be'."—Tobias Menley, GenreTable of Contents1. Romanticism and Real Abstraction 2. Kant's Remaining Time 3. Hegel in and Out of the Woods 4. Wollstonecraft in Ruins 5. Accidental Revelation in Wordsworth 6. Shelley's Ethereal Poetics

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith this incisive work, Palmer Rampell reveals the surprising role genre fiction played in redefining the category of the private person in the postwar period. Especially after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to privacy in 1965, legal scholars, judges, and the public scrambled to understand the scope of that right. Before and after the Court's ruling, authors of genre fiction and film reformulated their aliens, androids, and monsters to engage in debates about personal privacy as it pertained to issues like abortion, police surveillance, and euthanasia. Triangulating novels and films with original archival discoveries and historical and legal research, Rampell provides new readings of Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The book pairs the right of privacy for heterosexual sex with queer and proto-feminist crime fiction; racialized police surveillance at midcentury with Black crime fiction; Roe v. Wade (1973) with 1960s and 1970s science fiction; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974) with horror; and the right to die with westerns. While we are accustomed to defenses of fiction for its capacity to represent fully rendered private life, Rampell suggests that we might value a certain strand of genre fiction for its capacity to theorize the meaning of the protean concept of privacy.Trade Review"In crisp and lucid prose, Palmer Rampell gives us new and compelling views of the ambitious genre writers who explored the rough edges of the postwar liberal consensus. Bolstered with rare finds from Rampell's original archival research, this book brilliantly shows the unnoted power of genre fiction."—Sean McCann, author of A Pinnacle of Feeling"This richly interdisciplinary book transforms our understanding of the relationship between privacy and literature, and Rampell's provocative readings of genre fiction mount a compelling case against literary and liberal truisms about the bourgeois private self."—Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges"Genres of Privacyis a brainy and painstaking literature review of a variety of postwar genre works and their relationship to contemporary privacy-related issues... Rampell's expansive definition of the right to privacy gives his book a wide sweep and provides a view into several different issues and genres, lending it an immediate relevance."—Harrison Blackman, Los Angeles Review of Books"Recommended."—G. Grieve-Carlson, CHOICE

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisNovels are often said to help us understand how others think—especially when those others are profoundly different from us. When interpreting a character's behavior, readers are believed to make use of "Theory of Mind," the general human capacity to attribute mental states to other people. In many well-known nineteenth-century American novels, however, characters behave in ways that are opaque to readers, other characters, and even themselves, undermining efforts to explain their actions in terms of mental states like beliefs and intentions. Writing the Mind dives into these unintelligible moments to map the weaknesses of Theory of Mind and explore alternative frameworks for interpreting behavior. Through readings of authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, Martin Delany, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain, Hannah Walser explains how experimental models of cognition lead to some of the strangest formal features of canonical American texts. These authors' attempts to found social life on something other than mental states not only invite us to revise our assumptions about the centrality of mind reading and empathy to the novel as a form; they can also help us understand more contemporary concepts in social cognition, including gaslighting and learned helplessness, with more conceptual rigor and historical depth.Trade Review"This deeply interdisciplinary book is also a call to literary scholars to attend to the ways in which cognitive theory can enhance our understanding of how fiction operates formally. Elegantly written, thoughtful, and thorough."—Justine S. Murison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"Walser provides a stunning reevaluation of the work fiction does to experiment with the problem of other people's minds. Essential for scholars interested in thinking about social cognition, cognitive diversity, and how those phenomena were explored in the nineteenth century."—Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University"Writing the Mind carefully parses through canonical nineteenth-century American texts, sagaciously teasing new readings from familiar and rich passages. Covering a stunning array of primary texts and theorists, Walser offers a compelling new lens through which to read the socio-cognition of some of the nineteenth-century's most familiar, if baffling, characters."—Kassie Jo Baron, Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Toward a Literary History of Cognition 1. Boundedness 2. Epistemic Reality 3. Causal Power 4. Responsibility

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is necessary for capitalism. Hanson treats rhetorical language as an archive of capital's accumulation through dispossession, in works by S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Moseley, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as in contemporary film and critical theory. Reading riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and the paradoxical coincidence of subsistence living with industrialization, Hanson shows the figural to be a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. But this survival is not always-already resistant to capitalism, nor are the origins of capital accumulation confined to the Romantic past. Hanson reveals rhetorical figure as entwined in deeply ambivalent ways with the circuitous, ongoing process of dispossession. Reading both historically and rhetorically, Hanson argues that rhetorical language records histories of dispossession and the racialized, gendered distribution of the labor of subsistence. Romanticism, they show, is more contemporary than ever.Trade Review"For Lenora Hanson, careful attunement to rhetorical and poetic figuration in the age of Romanticism must not only acknowledge its deployment in forms of dispossession enacted by and against capital; it must also chart the movement of the figure in the proliferation of subsistence in the war against subsistence, in the riot of differences in the accumulation of differences, and in the globality of Romanticism that survives the globalization of Romanticism. To understand these stringent requirements—and then to practice them, with such aplomb, brilliance, and dedication—is a stirring achievement. The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation is a work of massive and singular importance."—Fred Moten, New York University"This is a profound work that engages as deeply with Romantic poetry as it does with traditions of literary criticism, gender studies, and critical race studies. The seriousness and lyricism of its argumentation will make this an enduring contribution."—Jordy Rosenberg, University of Massachusetts-Amherst"This book establishes Hanson as a significant theorist of subsistence and will be a landmark of Romanticism. Original, learned, and always engaging."—Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine"Reading historically and rhetorically is itself a complex way. It is to Hanson's credit that this book is intricate—wide-ranging and lateral in its connections, deeply learned and ethical in its orientation—without being difficult to learn things from. Hanson argues as well as teaches, tells as well as shows through examples, illustrations, and, in one case, a bespoke visualization of the spatial logic of Joseph Priestley's An Account of a Society for Encouraging the Industriousness of the Poor (1787). Thus Hanson invites readers interested both in and beyond Romanticism to meet the problem of Marx's 'so-called primitive accumulation' in the gendered and racialized forms of subsistence that dispossession produces and figuration records."—Carmen Faye Mathes, Critical InquiryTable of Contents0. Introduction: The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation 1. Apostrophe and Riot 2. Anachronism, Dreams, and Enclosure 3. Tautology, Witchcraft, and a Thingly Commons 4. Figure, Space, and Race between 1769 and 1985 5. Coda toward a Global Romanticism

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this revisionist account of romantic-era poetry and language philosophy, Tristram Wolff recovers vibrant ways of thinking language and nature together. Wolff argues that well-known writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau offer a radical chronopolitics in reaction to the "uprooted word," or the formal analytic used to classify languages in progressive time according to a primitivist timeline of history and a hierarchy of civilization. Before the bad naturalisms of nineteenth-century race science could harden language into place as a metric of social difference, poets and thinkers try to soften, thicken, deepen, and dissolve it. This naturalizing tendency makes language more difficult to uproot from its active formation in the lives of its speakers. And its "gray romanticism" simultaneously gives language different kinds of time—most strikingly, the deep time of geologic form—to forestall the hardening of time into progress. Reorienting romantic studies to consider colonialism's pervasive effects on theories of language origin, Wolff shows us the ambivalent position of romantics in this history. His reparative reading makes visible language's ability to reimagine social forms. Trade Review"Against the Uprooted Word is a splendid piece of scholarship. It will be a welcome arrival to students across disciplines (including language studies and anthropology) in addition to charting the future of the literary field—romanticism—in which it is most immediately grounded."—William Galperin, author of The History of Missed Opportunities"Wolff reclaims the literary imaginary as a rich archive for rethinking linguistics and philology. This erudite, ranging, and provocative book has helped me to learn—and unlearn—a lot."—Maureen McLane, author of My Poets"The compelling conjunctions of imaginative literature and linguistic, philological, and proto-anthropological theories that [Against the Uprooted Word] presents make the most convincing case for the discrepant force of Romantic-era writing, and Wolff is an impressively erudite guide to this richly comparative, interdisciplinary, and trans-Atlantic Romanticism."—Nancy Yousef, European Romantic Review"The book's arguments are extraordinarily complex and nuanced. Wolff marshals an impressive erudition, an original theoretical synthesis (drawing on thinkers from Denise Ferreira da Silva to Valentin Voloshinov), and a fine sensitivity to minute inflections and reverberations of linguistic and poetic form."—Joseph Albernaz, Nineteenth-Century Contexts"Against the Uprooted Word is an original, incisive study, a perceptive weaving together of various threads in recent Romanticist scholarship that revisits the familiar terrain of Romantic language theory in a consequential, disorienting, and ultimately hopeful way."—Jacob Risinger, Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Pulling Roots 1. Giving Language Time 2. The Transported Word: Wheatley's Part 3. Voices of the Ground: Blake's Language in Deep Time 4. Radical Diversions: Wordsworth's Overgrowth 5. The Primitive Today: Thoreau in the Wild Conclusion: Deracination

Read more less

Book SynopsisMid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth's mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.Trade Review"This brilliant book tackles a vital topic with creativity, grace, and depth. Chock full of ideas, Writing Our Extinction opens up fascinating questions about what Whitmarsh calls 'vertical science.' A crucial touchstone for current debates in ecocriticism."—Caren Irr, Brandeis University"What happens when we look up? Or look down? Writing Our Extinction insists these are vital questions to ask, as it carefully shows how vertical perspectives illuminate a present ripe with the anticipation of our species' demise."—Min Hyoung Song, Boston College"[For] an ecological humanism characteristically prone to deep despair (on the one hand) and deluded self-aggrandizement (on the other), Writing Our Extinction is an exemplary model for how to do this hard work right."—Gerry Canavan, H-EnvironmentTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Vertical Anthropocene 1. Earthly Language: Don DeLillo and the Novel of the Anthropocene 2. Plot Holes: Anthropocene Fiction After Project Mohole 3. Overview Effects: Anthropocene Fiction in the Orbital Field 4. Fossil Labor: Anthropocene Fiction and the Racial Politics of Extinction Underview: Writing Our Resilience

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is necessary for capitalism. Hanson treats rhetorical language as an archive of capital's accumulation through dispossession, in works by S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Moseley, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as in contemporary film and critical theory. Reading riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and the paradoxical coincidence of subsistence living with industrialization, Hanson shows the figural to be a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. But this survival is not always-already resistant to capitalism, nor are the origins of capital accumulation confined to the Romantic past. Hanson reveals rhetorical figure as entwined in deeply ambivalent ways with the circuitous, ongoing process of dispossession. Reading both historically and rhetorically, Hanson argues that rhetorical language records histories of dispossession and the racialized, gendered distribution of the labor of subsistence. Romanticism, they show, is more contemporary than ever.Trade Review"For Lenora Hanson, careful attunement to rhetorical and poetic figuration in the age of Romanticism must not only acknowledge its deployment in forms of dispossession enacted by and against capital; it must also chart the movement of the figure in the proliferation of subsistence in the war against subsistence, in the riot of differences in the accumulation of differences, and in the globality of Romanticism that survives the globalization of Romanticism. To understand these stringent requirements—and then to practice them, with such aplomb, brilliance, and dedication—is a stirring achievement. The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation is a work of massive and singular importance."—Fred Moten, New York University"This is a profound work that engages as deeply with Romantic poetry as it does with traditions of literary criticism, gender studies, and critical race studies. The seriousness and lyricism of its argumentation will make this an enduring contribution."—Jordy Rosenberg, University of Massachusetts-Amherst"This book establishes Hanson as a significant theorist of subsistence and will be a landmark of Romanticism. Original, learned, and always engaging."—Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine"Reading historically and rhetorically is itself a complex way. It is to Hanson's credit that this book is intricate—wide-ranging and lateral in its connections, deeply learned and ethical in its orientation—without being difficult to learn things from. Hanson argues as well as teaches, tells as well as shows through examples, illustrations, and, in one case, a bespoke visualization of the spatial logic of Joseph Priestley's An Account of a Society for Encouraging the Industriousness of the Poor (1787). Thus Hanson invites readers interested both in and beyond Romanticism to meet the problem of Marx's 'so-called primitive accumulation' in the gendered and racialized forms of subsistence that dispossession produces and figuration records."—Carmen Faye Mathes, Critical InquiryTable of Contents0. Introduction: The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation 1. Apostrophe and Riot 2. Anachronism, Dreams, and Enclosure 3. Tautology, Witchcraft, and a Thingly Commons 4. Figure, Space, and Race between 1769 and 1985 5. Coda toward a Global Romanticism

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech—such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency—into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain's twin crises of territorialization—of empire and of new media—spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech's tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to US empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech's colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship. Refiguring Speech offers students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication. Trade Review"Refiguring Speech is a daring and deft new work within Victorian studies as well as colonial and postcolonial theory. Its brilliant, timely argument for retheorizing 'talk' as racially embodied linguistic production represents the next generation of research."—Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside"This book makes a sophisticated argument about the distinction between speech and talk in the late Victorian novel and how, when the propriety of speech gives way to talk, glimpses of an anticolonial aesthetic come into view. Illuminating and eloquent."—Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College"InRefiguring Speech, Wong analyzes four Victorian novels that illustrate a breakdown in the notion of speech as an indication of cultural self-possession and the erosion of the assumption of Ango-European civilization as universal.... Recommended."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson 2. Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker's White Cosmopolitics 3. George Meredith's Profuse Inarticulacy 4. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's Dysfluent End of the World Conclusion

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisMid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth's mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.Trade Review"This brilliant book tackles a vital topic with creativity, grace, and depth. Chock full of ideas, Writing Our Extinction opens up fascinating questions about what Whitmarsh calls 'vertical science.' A crucial touchstone for current debates in ecocriticism."—Caren Irr, Brandeis University"What happens when we look up? Or look down? Writing Our Extinction insists these are vital questions to ask, as it carefully shows how vertical perspectives illuminate a present ripe with the anticipation of our species' demise."—Min Hyoung Song, Boston College"[For] an ecological humanism characteristically prone to deep despair (on the one hand) and deluded self-aggrandizement (on the other), Writing Our Extinction is an exemplary model for how to do this hard work right."—Gerry Canavan, H-EnvironmentTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Vertical Anthropocene 1. Earthly Language: Don DeLillo and the Novel of the Anthropocene 2. Plot Holes: Anthropocene Fiction After Project Mohole 3. Overview Effects: Anthropocene Fiction in the Orbital Field 4. Fossil Labor: Anthropocene Fiction and the Racial Politics of Extinction Underview: Writing Our Resilience

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique. Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical "grounds" through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel's grounds. Trade Review"The Grounds of the Novel is an exceptionally bold and brave work that pushes our understanding of the essence of fiction in new directions. This utterly original book will interest all scholars of the novel, particularly students of radical ontology."—Adela Pinch, University of Michigan"In this lyrical and intimate book, Wright invites us to look again at what metaphors of fictional being might do. Reconfiguring the metaphysics of the novel across time, he lays new groundwork for the intersection of personal and philosophical criticism."—David James, University of BirminghamTable of ContentsPreface: The Truth of Earth Introduction:On What There Is in the Novel 1. Groundwork 2. Underground 3. The Ground Gained 4. Meeting Grounds Afterword: Basement Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique. Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical "grounds" through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel's grounds. Trade Review"The Grounds of the Novel is an exceptionally bold and brave work that pushes our understanding of the essence of fiction in new directions. This utterly original book will interest all scholars of the novel, particularly students of radical ontology."—Adela Pinch, University of Michigan"In this lyrical and intimate book, Wright invites us to look again at what metaphors of fictional being might do. Reconfiguring the metaphysics of the novel across time, he lays new groundwork for the intersection of personal and philosophical criticism."—David James, University of BirminghamTable of ContentsPreface: The Truth of Earth Introduction:On What There Is in the Novel 1. Groundwork 2. Underground 3. The Ground Gained 4. Meeting Grounds Afterword: Basement Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisIs plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting—and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place. In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world—and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel participates in the same lines of inquiry about the world as pursued by the natural and physical sciences. Lee argues that the novel emerges and evolves in tandem with the development of scientific practices and concepts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to investigate the idea of a unified and objective world. Drawing on readings from Defoe, Austen, Scott, and many others, Lee demonstrates how bodies, human and non-human, behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot, and how they are subject to causes and consequences that can occur independently of individual action, social forces, or metaphysical destiny. This interest in representing and exploring how things happen sets the novel apart from other literary genres, and makes the history of science integral to the understanding of the history and theory of the novel, and of narrative. Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.Trade Review"The Natural Laws of Plot adds to a growing slate of new materialist accounts of the eighteenth century and of the novel, yet it does so in a way that excitingly resuscitates plot—too often ignored or reduced to mere human action at the exclusion of the uncountable actions and reactions of the world. In grounding plot in the eighteenth century’s evolving notion of objectivity, Lee offers a fresh and convincing perspective on the capaciousness and complexity of plot." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"[An] impressive book...In its scope, its research, its originality, it is an important paving stone, so to speak, in our understanding of the novel. Lee’s book disarticulates plot from narrative and character, but she does not leave us with a macerated skeleton: plot is fused, living, into description and motion, matter and space, shaped by the forces that were seen shaping the (shall we say it?) real world." * Modern Philology *"[An] ingenious study...Lee shows herself well versed in contemporary narratology, but in developing this counter-history of plot, she sets to one side the uses of contemporary cognitive psychology for analyzing how plots are recognized and valued. Instead, she works in a historicistmode, explaining how a whole series of scientific models informed the thought experiments proffered by realist fiction...[O]ur histories and theories of the British novel, of realism, of plot, and of literature and science will stand greatly enriched by this study, to which all those working in those broad and interconnected fields should attend." * The Wordsworth Circle *"Ambitiously conceived and persuasively argued, The Natural Laws of Plot shows how, over a crucial century or more of British and Irish fiction, developments in experimental science came to shape the representation of action in the realist novel." * James Chandler, University of Chicago *

Read more less

Book SynopsisDeath and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period’s rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses—such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons—the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself—its parts, or its preserved representation—functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich’s analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA new history of the queer novel shows its role in constructing gay and lesbian lives The gay and lesbian novel has long been a distinct literary genre with its own awards, shelving categories, bookstore spaces, and book reviews. But very little has been said about the remarkable history of its emergence in American literature, particularly the ways in which the novel about homosexuality did not just reflect but actively produced queer life.Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight that the history of society is connected to the history of language, author Natasha Hurley charts the messy, complex movement by which the queer novel produced the very frames that made it legible as a distinct literature and central to the imagination of queer worlds. Her vision of the queer novel's development revolves around the bold argument that literary circulation is the key ingredient that has made the gay and lesbian novel and its queer forebears available to its audiences.Challenging the narrative that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept, Hurley posits a much longer history of this novelistic genre. In so doing, she revises our understanding of the history of sexuality, as well as of the processes of producing new concepts and the evolution of new categories of language.Trade Review"Circulating Queerness outlines a queer literary history founded in ‘rogue circulation’—the surprising pathways and unexpected affinities that emerge when texts stray beyond their expected circuits—rather than identity. Natasha Hurley’s attention to the way queerness accrues through rereading and recirculation constitutes a powerful intervention into how we understand what queer literature has been and what it might become."—Dana Luciano, Georgetown UniversityTable of ContentsContentsPrologue: On the Queer Worlds of BooksIntroduction: Circuits, Lies, and the Queer Novel in America1. Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee2. The Stoddard Archive and Its Dissed Contents3. Type Complication and Literary Old Maids4. Reading The Bostonians’s History of Sexuality from the Outside In5. Worlds Inside: Afterlives of Nineteenth-Century TypesCoda: Short Circuits and Untrodden PathsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisCo-winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture Once a small subculture, the steampunk phenomenon exploded in visibility during the first years of the twenty-first century, its influence and prominence increasing ever since. From its Victorian and literary roots to film and television, video games, music, and even fashion, this subgenre of science fiction reaches far and wide within current culture. Here Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall present cutting-edge essays on steampunk: its rise in popularity, its many manifestations, and why we should pay attention. Like Clockwork offers wide-ranging perspectives on steampunk’s history and its place in contemporary culture, all while speaking to the “why” and “why now” of the genre. In her essay, Catherine Siemann draws on authors such as William Gibson and China Miéville to analyze steampunk cities; Kathryn Crowther turns to disability studies to examine the role of prosthetics within steampunk as well as the contemporary culture of access; and Diana M. Pho reviews the racial and national identities of steampunk, bringing in discussions of British chap-hop artists, African American steamfunk practitioners, and multicultural steampunk fan cultures.From disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities, Like Clockwork explores the intriguing history of steampunk to evaluate the influence of the genre from the 1970s through the twenty-first century. Contributors: Kathryn Crowther, Perimeter College at Georgia State University; Shaun Duke, University of Florida; Stefania Forlini, University of Calgary (Canada); Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin–Waukesha; Mike Perschon, MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta; Diana M. Pho; David Pike, American University; Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Joseph Weakland, Georgia Institute of Technology; Roger Whitson, Washington State University. Trade Review"A lively, engaging collection of essays about the past, present, future (and alternate versions thereof) of steampunk culture, literature and meaning, ranging from disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities."—Boing Boing"Covering an impressive range of topics, from steampunk cities to how steampunk addresses disabilities and identity, the essays are scholarly and full of solid examples and research yet remain accessible."—CHOICE"There are layers of irony and of ironic irony here that would keep a critical Lyell occupied for decades."—Science Fiction ReviewsTable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction. It’s about Time: Reading Steampunk’s Rise and Roots Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall I. Steampunk Spaces and Things 1. Steampunk and the Victorian City: Time Machines, Bryan Talbot, and the Center of the Multiverse David Pike 2. How to Theorize With a Hammer; or, Making and Baking Things in Steampunk and the Digital Humanities Roger Whitson 3. The Steampunk City in Crisis Catherine Siemann II. Steampunk Bodies and Identities 4. From Steam Arms to Brass Goggles: Steampunk, Prostheses and Disability Kathryn Crowther 5. The Aesthete, the Dandy, and the Steampunk; or Things as They are Now Stefania Forlini 6. Punking the Other: On the Performance of Racial and National Identities in Steampunk Diana M. Pho III. Steampunk Reading and Revising 7. Seminal Steampunk: Proper and True Mike Perschon 8. The Alchemy of Aether: Steampunk as Reading Practice in Karina Cooper’s Tarnished and Gilded Lisa Hager 9. Out of Control: Disrupting Technological Mastery in Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air and K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices Joseph Weakland and Shaun Duke Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisCo-winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture Once a small subculture, the steampunk phenomenon exploded in visibility during the first years of the twenty-first century, its influence and prominence increasing ever since. From its Victorian and literary roots to film and television, video games, music, and even fashion, this subgenre of science fiction reaches far and wide within current culture. Here Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall present cutting-edge essays on steampunk: its rise in popularity, its many manifestations, and why we should pay attention. Like Clockwork offers wide-ranging perspectives on steampunk’s history and its place in contemporary culture, all while speaking to the “why” and “why now” of the genre. In her essay, Catherine Siemann draws on authors such as William Gibson and China Miéville to analyze steampunk cities; Kathryn Crowther turns to disability studies to examine the role of prosthetics within steampunk as well as the contemporary culture of access; and Diana M. Pho reviews the racial and national identities of steampunk, bringing in discussions of British chap-hop artists, African American steamfunk practitioners, and multicultural steampunk fan cultures.From disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities, Like Clockwork explores the intriguing history of steampunk to evaluate the influence of the genre from the 1970s through the twenty-first century. Contributors: Kathryn Crowther, Perimeter College at Georgia State University; Shaun Duke, University of Florida; Stefania Forlini, University of Calgary (Canada); Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin–Waukesha; Mike Perschon, MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta; Diana M. Pho; David Pike, American University; Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Joseph Weakland, Georgia Institute of Technology; Roger Whitson, Washington State University. Trade Review"A lively, engaging collection of essays about the past, present, future (and alternate versions thereof) of steampunk culture, literature and meaning, ranging from disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities."—Boing Boing"Covering an impressive range of topics, from steampunk cities to how steampunk addresses disabilities and identity, the essays are scholarly and full of solid examples and research yet remain accessible."—CHOICE"There are layers of irony and of ironic irony here that would keep a critical Lyell occupied for decades."—Science Fiction ReviewsTable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction. It’s about Time: Reading Steampunk’s Rise and Roots Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall I. Steampunk Spaces and Things 1. Steampunk and the Victorian City: Time Machines, Bryan Talbot, and the Center of the Multiverse David Pike 2. How to Theorize With a Hammer; or, Making and Baking Things in Steampunk and the Digital Humanities Roger Whitson 3. The Steampunk City in Crisis Catherine Siemann II. Steampunk Bodies and Identities 4. From Steam Arms to Brass Goggles: Steampunk, Prostheses and Disability Kathryn Crowther 5. The Aesthete, the Dandy, and the Steampunk; or Things as They are Now Stefania Forlini 6. Punking the Other: On the Performance of Racial and National Identities in Steampunk Diana M. Pho III. Steampunk Reading and Revising 7. Seminal Steampunk: Proper and True Mike Perschon 8. The Alchemy of Aether: Steampunk as Reading Practice in Karina Cooper’s Tarnished and Gilded Lisa Hager 9. Out of Control: Disrupting Technological Mastery in Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air and K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices Joseph Weakland and Shaun Duke Contributors Index

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisReviving a lost classic of American fairy–tale literature Charles Godfrey Leland was one of the most popular American writers and artists of the nineteenth century, publishing more than twenty books of legends, fairy tales, humor, and essays. Today, however, he is a woefully underappreciated writer. Written, designed, and illustrated by Leland in 1892, The Book of One Hundred Riddles of the Fairy Bellaria is a forgotten classic and a small sample of his influential and experimental work. The Book of One Hundred Riddles of the Fairy Bellaria features the Scheherazade-like fairy goddess Bellaria: powerful and mysterious, courageous and clever, goddess of spring, flowers, love, fate, and death. In this story, Bellaria engages in a duel of wits with an evil king, a death match of one hundred riddles. Each riddle is spoken as a rhyme and illustrated by an original engraving in the arts and crafts style. This book is a beautiful reintroduction to Leland and his pioneering design.

Read more less

Book SynopsisNew perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer “Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places,” muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel. Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood’s recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.Approaching Isherwood’s rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic.Contributors: Barrie Jean Borich, DePaul U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Penn State U, University Park; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Calvin W. Keogh, Central European U, Budapest; Victor Marsh; Wendy Moffat, Dickinson College; Xenobe Purvis; Bidhan Roy, California State U, Los Angeles; Katharine Stevenson, U of Texas at Austin; Edmund White. Trade Review"The seventeen essays resulted from a conference after the opening of Isherwood’s vast archive at The Huntington, and approach Isherwood in light of his peripatetic days and his continuing spiritual, Vedantic explorations of the spirit. Be sure to read Christopher Bram’s excellent foreword."—Lavender Magazine"The book does not try to dissimulate Isherwood’s hesitations and occasional mistakes, related to issues of class (for instance in his perhaps somewhat exploitative relationships with working class, that is unemployed and hungry hustlers in his Berlin years) or race (for instance in his contacts with Mishima). This is a very courageous and mature approach, and I think a very healthy stance in the current context of revenge culture."—Leonardo Reviews"Anyone with an interest in Isherwood or in Japanese culture and sexual patterns will find this book a worthwhile acquisition."—Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide Table of ContentsContentsForeword: A Fan’s NotesChristopher BramIntroduction: Christopher’s KindChris Freeman and James J. Berg1. Christopher Isherwood and the California Dream Sara S. Hodson2. “Rejecting the Real World Outright”: The Shared Fantasy of Mortmere Katherine Stevenson3. “A Faith of Personal Sincerity”: Christopher Isherwood’s Debt to the Individualism of E. M. ForsterXenobe Purvis4. The Archival “I”: Forster, Isherwood, and the Future of Queer Biography Wendy Moffat5. A Queer Progress: Christopher Isherwood, Sexual Exceptionalism, and Thirties’ Berlin Lois Cucullu6. Fellow Travelers James J. Berg and Chris Freeman7. Isherwood as Travel Writer Lisa Colletta8.The World in the Evening: Character in TransitRobert L. Caserio9. Isherwood’s “Jolly Corner” in Down There on a Visit: The Christopher Who Was Encounters the Christopher Who Might Have Been Carola M. Kaplan10. Grumbling in Eldorado: A Single Man in the American Utopia Calvin W. Keogh11. Pacific Rimming: Queer Expatriatism, Transpacific Los Angeles, and Christopher Isherwood’s Queer SixtiesJaime Harker12. Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading A Single Man Edmund White13. We Can See the Hilld from Our Bed: Christopher and His Nonfictions Barrie Jean Borich14. In Search of a Spiritual Home: Christopher Isherwood, the Perennial Philosophy, and Vedanta Bidhan Chandra Roy15. “Enlarging Their Clearing in the Jungle”: The Political Significance of Christopher Isherwood’s My Guru and His Disciple Victor Marsh16. “The Aim of Art is to Transcend Art”: Writing Spirituality in My Guru and His Disciple Jamie Carr17. A Conversation with Christopher Isherwood, 1979 Dennis BartelAcknowledgmentsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisNew perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer “Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places,” muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel. Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood’s recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.Approaching Isherwood’s rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic.Contributors: Barrie Jean Borich, DePaul U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Penn State U, University Park; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Calvin W. Keogh, Central European U, Budapest; Victor Marsh; Wendy Moffat, Dickinson College; Xenobe Purvis; Bidhan Roy, California State U, Los Angeles; Katharine Stevenson, U of Texas at Austin; Edmund White. Trade Review"The seventeen essays resulted from a conference after the opening of Isherwood’s vast archive at The Huntington, and approach Isherwood in light of his peripatetic days and his continuing spiritual, Vedantic explorations of the spirit. Be sure to read Christopher Bram’s excellent foreword."—Lavender Magazine"The book does not try to dissimulate Isherwood’s hesitations and occasional mistakes, related to issues of class (for instance in his perhaps somewhat exploitative relationships with working class, that is unemployed and hungry hustlers in his Berlin years) or race (for instance in his contacts with Mishima). This is a very courageous and mature approach, and I think a very healthy stance in the current context of revenge culture."—Leonardo Reviews"Anyone with an interest in Isherwood or in Japanese culture and sexual patterns will find this book a worthwhile acquisition."—Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide Table of ContentsContentsForeword: A Fan’s NotesChristopher BramIntroduction: Christopher’s KindChris Freeman and James J. Berg1. Christopher Isherwood and the California Dream Sara S. Hodson2. “Rejecting the Real World Outright”: The Shared Fantasy of Mortmere Katherine Stevenson3. “A Faith of Personal Sincerity”: Christopher Isherwood’s Debt to the Individualism of E. M. ForsterXenobe Purvis4. The Archival “I”: Forster, Isherwood, and the Future of Queer Biography Wendy Moffat5. A Queer Progress: Christopher Isherwood, Sexual Exceptionalism, and Thirties’ Berlin Lois Cucullu6. Fellow Travelers James J. Berg and Chris Freeman7. Isherwood as Travel Writer Lisa Colletta8.The World in the Evening: Character in TransitRobert L. Caserio9. Isherwood’s “Jolly Corner” in Down There on a Visit: The Christopher Who Was Encounters the Christopher Who Might Have Been Carola M. Kaplan10. Grumbling in Eldorado: A Single Man in the American Utopia Calvin W. Keogh11. Pacific Rimming: Queer Expatriatism, Transpacific Los Angeles, and Christopher Isherwood’s Queer SixtiesJaime Harker12. Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading A Single Man Edmund White13. We Can See the Hilld from Our Bed: Christopher and His Nonfictions Barrie Jean Borich14. In Search of a Spiritual Home: Christopher Isherwood, the Perennial Philosophy, and Vedanta Bidhan Chandra Roy15. “Enlarging Their Clearing in the Jungle”: The Political Significance of Christopher Isherwood’s My Guru and His Disciple Victor Marsh16. “The Aim of Art is to Transcend Art”: Writing Spirituality in My Guru and His Disciple Jamie Carr17. A Conversation with Christopher Isherwood, 1979 Dennis BartelAcknowledgmentsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century “Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.Trade Review "Across a wide range of genres and authors, Sarah Wasserman argues that material artifacts—a poster, a dropped cotton bale, a collection of postage stamps, a dubious antique, a roll of blueprints, or a sign in a shop window—provide crucial plot points and also serve to signify emerging cultural forces. Tracking the structural transformations of post-World War II modernity, Wasserman calls attention to the ways these apparently trivial objects embody potent and latent energies. Whole histories reside in the clutter and stuff of small things deployed, she asserts, not as inert objects, but as agents of memory and imagination enacting the tension between what vanishes and what remains."—Johanna Drucker, author of Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist "As in person, so in print: Sarah Wasserman is a witty conversationalist and infallible guide to postwar American literature. Her writers are known for largesse of form, ambition of argument, and fascination for quirky objects, and it is an elective affinity, for that is her own mode. The things we least regard may be the things that most tell us who we are. Such is the wisdom found in this book. Transience, like books about it, makes things glow."—John Durham Peters, Yale University "Sarah Wasserman adds an important new chapter to our understanding of how narrative prose fiction represents the object world—not just the life of things, but also their dying, their death, and their unsettling, uncanny afterlife. She persuasively shows how integral the object world became to the American novel of the post-war era. Indeed, the great range here—from Doctorow to Marilyn Robinson, Chester Himes to Pynchon and DeLillo—demonstrates the persistence of things as a focus of the American literary imagination, and the insistence of things as a force in the human world, both individual and collective. To apprehend that insistence she offers an expanded definition of ephemera that will be useful to readers across fields, and to anyone trying to understand the dynamics by which objects form and transform human subjects."—Bill Brown, author of Other Things "The Death of Things manages to show us quite a lot about how fiction can serve as its own kind of cache—one that doesn’t preserve ephemera, exactly, but creates its own kind of afterlives for fading things... Wasserman’s incisive book considers what fiction can tell us about living among things that are so frequently disposable."—The Nation "The Death of Things is a phenomenal and fundamental book. It investigates what it means to be a human being. "—ASAP Journal "Wasserman offers not only an innovative approach to literary criticism but also a literary critical method, one that understands the inevitability and incompleteness of loss."—Winterthur Portfolio Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Death of Things1. Yesterday’s Tomorrowland: E. L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon, and the 1939 World’s Fair2. Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject: Philp K. Dick, Philip Roth, and the Second World War3. Zoned Out: Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Urban Infrastructure4. Time, Stamped: Thomas Pynchon’s Media Systems5. The Disorder of Things: Marilynne Robinson’s Transient Women6. Ephemeral Gods, Billboard Saints: Don DeLillo’s ApparitionsCoda: The Afterlife of Things: Ephemera in the Digital AgeAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century “Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.Trade Review "Across a wide range of genres and authors, Sarah Wasserman argues that material artifacts—a poster, a dropped cotton bale, a collection of postage stamps, a dubious antique, a roll of blueprints, or a sign in a shop window—provide crucial plot points and also serve to signify emerging cultural forces. Tracking the structural transformations of post-World War II modernity, Wasserman calls attention to the ways these apparently trivial objects embody potent and latent energies. Whole histories reside in the clutter and stuff of small things deployed, she asserts, not as inert objects, but as agents of memory and imagination enacting the tension between what vanishes and what remains."—Johanna Drucker, author of Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist "As in person, so in print: Sarah Wasserman is a witty conversationalist and infallible guide to postwar American literature. Her writers are known for largesse of form, ambition of argument, and fascination for quirky objects, and it is an elective affinity, for that is her own mode. The things we least regard may be the things that most tell us who we are. Such is the wisdom found in this book. Transience, like books about it, makes things glow."—John Durham Peters, Yale University "Sarah Wasserman adds an important new chapter to our understanding of how narrative prose fiction represents the object world—not just the life of things, but also their dying, their death, and their unsettling, uncanny afterlife. She persuasively shows how integral the object world became to the American novel of the post-war era. Indeed, the great range here—from Doctorow to Marilyn Robinson, Chester Himes to Pynchon and DeLillo—demonstrates the persistence of things as a focus of the American literary imagination, and the insistence of things as a force in the human world, both individual and collective. To apprehend that insistence she offers an expanded definition of ephemera that will be useful to readers across fields, and to anyone trying to understand the dynamics by which objects form and transform human subjects."—Bill Brown, author of Other Things "The Death of Things manages to show us quite a lot about how fiction can serve as its own kind of cache—one that doesn’t preserve ephemera, exactly, but creates its own kind of afterlives for fading things... Wasserman’s incisive book considers what fiction can tell us about living among things that are so frequently disposable."—The Nation "The Death of Things is a phenomenal and fundamental book. It investigates what it means to be a human being. "—ASAP Journal "Wasserman offers not only an innovative approach to literary criticism but also a literary critical method, one that understands the inevitability and incompleteness of loss."—Winterthur Portfolio Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Death of Things1. Yesterday’s Tomorrowland: E. L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon, and the 1939 World’s Fair2. Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject: Philp K. Dick, Philip Roth, and the Second World War3. Zoned Out: Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Urban Infrastructure4. Time, Stamped: Thomas Pynchon’s Media Systems5. The Disorder of Things: Marilynne Robinson’s Transient Women6. Ephemeral Gods, Billboard Saints: Don DeLillo’s ApparitionsCoda: The Afterlife of Things: Ephemera in the Digital AgeAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era What can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a vibrant, emergent perspective on the Anthropocene. In this volume, more than a dozen scholars move beyond longstanding perspectives on the Anthropocene—such as science fiction and apocalyptic narratives—to show that the Gothic offers a unique (and dark) interpretation of events like climate change, diminished ecosystems, and mass extinction.Embracing pop cultural phenomena like True Detective, Jaws, and Twin Peaks, as well as topics from the New Weird and prehistoric shark fiction to ruin porn and the “monstroscene,” Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Gothic while opening important new paths of inquiry. These essays map a genealogy of the Gothic while providing fresh perspectives on the ongoing climate chaos, the North/South divide, issues of racialization, dark ecology, questions surrounding environmental justice, and much more.Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Timothy Clark, U of Durham; Rebecca Duncan, Linnaeus U; Michael Fuchs, U of Oldenburg, Germany; Esthie Hugo, U of Warwick; Dawn Keetley, Lehigh U; Laura R. Kremmel, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Barry Murnane, U of Oxford; Jennifer Schell, U of Alaska Fairbanks; Lisa M. Vetere, Monmouth U; Sara Wasson, Lancaster U; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.Trade Review"All of the essays connect the subjective potency of the texts under discussion — the affects and moods that they inspire in the reader or viewer — to the ways that such works also give us a deeper understanding of the ongoing ecological transactions that are putting our very existence at risk. Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth both reclaims the gothic as an urgently relevant mode of fiction-making and suggests that aesthetic approaches are able to bring us a kind of understanding that scientific studies on their own could not."—Los Angeles Review of Books"It is impossible for me to do complete justice to this book in a review, but I will say that the sixteen essays included in it are all illuminating, thoughtful, and interesting."—Gothic WandererTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Gothic in the AnthropocenePart I. Anthropocene1. The AnthropoceneJeffrey Andrew Weinstock2. De-extinction: A Gothic Masternarrative for the AnthropoceneMichael Fuchs3. Lovecraft vs. VanderMeer: Posthuman Horror (and Hope?) in the Zone of ExceptionRune Graulund4. Monstrous Megalodons of the Anthropocene: Extinction and Adaptation in Prehistoric Shark Fiction, 1974–2018Jennifer Schell5. A Violence “Just below the Skin”: Atmospheric Terror and Racial Ecologies from the African AnthropoceneEsthie HugoPart II. Plantationocene6. Horrors of the Horticultural: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Landscapes of the AnthropoceneLisa M. Vetere7. True Detective’s Folk GothicDawn Keetley8. Beyond the Slaughterhouse: Anthropocene, Animals, and GothicJustin D. EdwardsPart III. Capitalocene9. Gothic in the Capitalocene: World-Ecological Crisis, Decolonial Horror, and the South African PostcolonyRebecca Duncan10. Overpopulation: The Human as InhumanTimothy Clark11. Digging Up Dirt: Reading the Anthropocene through German RomanticismBarry Murnane12. Got a Light? The Dark Currents of Energy in Twin Peaks: The ReturnTimothy Morton and Rune GraulundPart IV. Chthulucene13. The Anthropocene Within: Love and Extinction in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the BridgeJohan Höglund14. Rot and Recycle: Gothic Eco-burialLaura R. Kremmel15. Erotics and Annihilation: Caitlín R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the “Anthropocene”Sara Wasson16. MonstroceneFred BottingContributorsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present Long seen as a realm of mystery and possibility, the subsurface beneath our feet has taken on all-too-real import in the era of climate change. Can reading narratives of the past that take imaginative leaps under the surface better attune us to our present knowledge of a warming planet?In Subsurface, Karen Pinkus looks below the surface of texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Sand, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jules Verne to find the buried origins of capitalist fantasies in which humans take what they want from the earth. Putting such texts into conversation with narrative theory, critical theory, geology, and climate policy, she shows that the subsurface has been, in our past, a place of myth and stories of male voyages down to gain knowledge—but it is also now the realm of fossil fuels. How do these two modes intertwine?A highly original take on evocative terms such as extraction, burial, fossils, deep time, and speculative futurity, Subsurface questions the certainty of comfortable narrative arcs. It asks us to read literature with and against the figure of the geological column, with and against fossil fuels and the emissions warming our planet. As we see our former selves move into the distance, what new modes of imagination might we summon?Trade Review "Considering a renewal of life that would begin in the subsurface of the earth, Karen Pinkus deftly navigates between nineteenth-century literature and current issues in geology, critical theory, and philosophy. Digging into the past to imagine a sustainable future, written with spark and wit, Subsurface is a welcome contribution to the environmental humanities."—Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University "A truly geologic, stratigraphic criticism of and for the multiple layers and ages of climate change. Karen Pinkus’s work forms the critical bedrock of environmental and energy humanities. Here, she goes underground, surveying a classic range of subterranean narratives and their striated formations across time and space, fusing with other realms of knowledge that climate challenges literature to uncover. Pinkus's critical alchemy mines novel seams, peels back undiscovered layers of texts and meaning, and cracks open new possibilities for reading narrative within and against the challenges of climate's unfolding futures. Tunneling back and forth from the crucial century of Verne and the rise of geology to contemporary debates over geoengineering, carbon sequestration, and extractivism, she explores carbonizing economic theory and assesses the strange formations of climate finance en route. Subsurface reassesses the grounds of and for literature and literary criticism as resource and method to confront our age of earthbound and atmospheric crisis, mapping its unruly domains, its shifting terrain and hidden impacts. This is exactly the kind of nonconformist analysis we need to navigate climate's deep and complex resonances."—Graeme Macdonald, University of Warwick

Read more less

Book SynopsisTopothesia reads urban planning as a mode of speculative fiction, one inextricably linked to histories of British colonialism and liberalism through a particular understanding of place. The book focuses on town planning from the late nineteenth century to the present day, showing how the contemporary geography of Britain—sharply unequal and marked by racial division—continues ideologies of place established in colonial contexts. Specifically, planning allows for the speculative construction of future places that are both utopian in their ability to resolve political disagreement and at the same tantalizingly realizable, able to be produced in concrete reality. This speculative imaginary, I argue, is only possible within the ideological framework of colonialism and the history of empire within which it developed. Topothesia refers to a rhetorical device employing the vivid depiction of an often-imaginary place. This device, Vijay shows, helps us understand urban planning as a narrative genre, one that, even in its most mundane documents, is compelled to produce elaborate fantasies of future places. The book examines specific planning movements over time to understand the form and the stakes of their speculative worlds. In building these worlds, the book shows, planners continually coopted literary critiques of the present and reveries of the future, retaining literature's aesthetics while eschewing its politics. At the same time, Vijay shows, writers and artists have dwelled within and against these colonial imaginaries to seek other means of representing place.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 Part I: Improving Places: Liberal Colonialism and the Speculative Imaginary of Early Planning 1. Garden Cities: The Art and Craft of Making Place in Edwardian Britain | 31 2. Planning as Imperial Cultivation in the Work of Patrick Geddes | 60 Part II: Diminishing Horizons: The Ambivalent Temporalities of Development 3. Capturing the City: Regeneration, Policing, and the Ghosts of Postcolonial Britain | 95 4. The End of London: Temporalities of the Gentrified City | 126 5. Level Up: Zadie Smith’s NW and the Promise of Progression | 158 6. Geographies of Discontent: Brexit and the Politics of Abandonment | 185 Coda | 215 Acknowledgments | 221 Notes | 225 Bibliography | 285 Index | 308

Read more less

Book SynopsisTopothesia reads urban planning as a mode of speculative fiction, one inextricably linked to histories of British colonialism and liberalism through a particular understanding of place. The book focuses on town planning from the late nineteenth century to the present day, showing how the contemporary geography of Britain—sharply unequal and marked by racial division—continues ideologies of place established in colonial contexts. Specifically, planning allows for the speculative construction of future places that are both utopian in their ability to resolve political disagreement and at the same tantalizingly realizable, able to be produced in concrete reality. This speculative imaginary, I argue, is only possible within the ideological framework of colonialism and the history of empire within which it developed. Topothesia refers to a rhetorical device employing the vivid depiction of an often-imaginary place. This device, Vijay shows, helps us understand urban planning as a narrative genre, one that, even in its most mundane documents, is compelled to produce elaborate fantasies of future places. The book examines specific planning movements over time to understand the form and the stakes of their speculative worlds. In building these worlds, the book shows, planners continually coopted literary critiques of the present and reveries of the future, retaining literature's aesthetics while eschewing its politics. At the same time, Vijay shows, writers and artists have dwelled within and against these colonial imaginaries to seek other means of representing place.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 Part I: Improving Places: Liberal Colonialism and the Speculative Imaginary of Early Planning 1. Garden Cities: The Art and Craft of Making Place in Edwardian Britain | 31 2. Planning as Imperial Cultivation in the Work of Patrick Geddes | 60 Part II: Diminishing Horizons: The Ambivalent Temporalities of Development 3. Capturing the City: Regeneration, Policing, and the Ghosts of Postcolonial Britain | 95 4. The End of London: Temporalities of the Gentrified City | 126 5. Level Up: Zadie Smith’s NW and the Promise of Progression | 158 6. Geographies of Discontent: Brexit and the Politics of Abandonment | 185 Coda | 215 Acknowledgments | 221 Notes | 225 Bibliography | 285 Index | 308

Read more less

Book SynopsisOffering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on “ominous matter” and “thing power.” In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many—more powerful—others. In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary “nonhuman turn,” expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.Table of ContentsPreface: Three Beginnings | vii Introduction: Ominous Matter | 1 1 Gothic Thing Theory | 19 2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism | 41 3 Body-as-Thing | 72 4 Thing-as- Body | 91 5 Book: How to Do Things with Words | 115 6 Building: Bigger on the Inside | 137 Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One’s Ordinary Life | 171 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 175 Works Cited | 181 Index | 195

Read more less

Book SynopsisOffering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on “ominous matter” and “thing power.” In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many—more powerful—others. In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary “nonhuman turn,” expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.Table of ContentsPreface: Three Beginnings | vii Introduction: Ominous Matter | 1 1 Gothic Thing Theory | 19 2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism | 41 3 Body-as-Thing | 72 4 Thing-as- Body | 91 5 Book: How to Do Things with Words | 115 6 Building: Bigger on the Inside | 137 Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One’s Ordinary Life | 171 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 175 Works Cited | 181 Index | 195

Read more less

Book SynopsisStartling Figures is about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a skeptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, these works retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular. Individual chapters include close readings of some of the best works of contemporary American Catholic fiction, which shed light on the narrative techniques that Catholic writers use to point their characters, and their readers, beyond the horizon of secularity and toward an idea of transcendence while also making connections between the widely acknowledged twentieth-century masters of the form and their twenty-first-century counterparts. This book is focused both on the aspects of craft that Catholic writers employ to shape the reader’s experience of the story and on the effect the story has on the reader. One recurring theme that is central to both is how often Catholic writers use narrative violence and other, similar disorienting techniques in order to unsettle the reader. These moments can leave both characters within the stories and the readers themselves shaken and unmoored, and this, O’Connell argues, is often a first step toward the recognition, and even possibly the acceptance, of grace. Individual chapters look at these themes in the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, Tim Gautreaux, Alice McDermott, George Saunders, and Phil Klay and Kirstin Valdez Quade.Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Surprise Me”: Going inside the “Black Box” of Catholic Fiction | 1 1 The “Blasting Annihilating Light” of Flannery O’Connor’s Art | 17 2 Disorientation and Reorientation in J. F. Powers’s Fiction | 34 3 Walker Percy and the End of the Modern World | 53 4 Tim Gautreaux and a Postconciliar Approach to Violence | 73 5 Belief and Ambiguity in the Fiction of Alice McDermott | 92 6 “Life Is Rough and Death Is Coming”: George Saunders and the Catholic Literary Tradition | 112 Epilogue: Phil Klay, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and the State of Contemporary Catholic Literature | 133 Acknowledgments | 147 Notes | 151 Works Cited | 165 Index | 173

Read more less

Book SynopsisStartling Figures is about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a skeptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, these works retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular. Individual chapters include close readings of some of the best works of contemporary American Catholic fiction, which shed light on the narrative techniques that Catholic writers use to point their characters, and their readers, beyond the horizon of secularity and toward an idea of transcendence while also making connections between the widely acknowledged twentieth-century masters of the form and their twenty-first-century counterparts. This book is focused both on the aspects of craft that Catholic writers employ to shape the reader’s experience of the story and on the effect the story has on the reader. One recurring theme that is central to both is how often Catholic writers use narrative violence and other, similar disorienting techniques in order to unsettle the reader. These moments can leave both characters within the stories and the readers themselves shaken and unmoored, and this, O’Connell argues, is often a first step toward the recognition, and even possibly the acceptance, of grace. Individual chapters look at these themes in the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, Tim Gautreaux, Alice McDermott, George Saunders, and Phil Klay and Kirstin Valdez Quade.Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Surprise Me”: Going inside the “Black Box” of Catholic Fiction | 1 1 The “Blasting Annihilating Light” of Flannery O’Connor’s Art | 17 2 Disorientation and Reorientation in J. F. Powers’s Fiction | 34 3 Walker Percy and the End of the Modern World | 53 4 Tim Gautreaux and a Postconciliar Approach to Violence | 73 5 Belief and Ambiguity in the Fiction of Alice McDermott | 92 6 “Life Is Rough and Death Is Coming”: George Saunders and the Catholic Literary Tradition | 112 Epilogue: Phil Klay, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and the State of Contemporary Catholic Literature | 133 Acknowledgments | 147 Notes | 151 Works Cited | 165 Index | 173

Read more less

Book SynopsisA micro-biography of horror fiction’s most influential author and his love–hate relationship with New York City. By the end of his life and near financial ruin, pulp horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft resigned himself to the likelihood that his writing would be forgotten. Today, Lovecraft stands alongside J. R. R. Tolkien as the most influential genre writer of the twentieth century. His reputation as an unreformed racist and bigot, however, leaves readers to grapple with his legacy. Midnight Rambles explores Lovecraft’s time in New York City, a crucial yet often overlooked chapter in his life that shaped his literary career and the inextricable racism in his work. Initially, New York stood as a place of liberation for Lovecraft. During the brief period between 1924 and 1926 when he lived there, Lovecraft joined a creative community and experimented with bohemian living in the publishing and cultural capital of the United States. He also married fellow writer Sonia H. Greene, a Ukrainian-Jewish émigré in the fashion industry. However, cascading personal setbacks and his own professional ineptitude soured him on New York. As Lovecraft became more frustrated, his xenophobia and racism became more pronounced. New York’s large immigrant population and minority communities disgusted him, and this mindset soon became evident in his writing. Many of his stories from this era are infused with racial and ethnic stereotypes and nativist themes, most notably his overtly racist short story, “The Horror at Red Hook,” set in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His personal letters reveal an even darker bigotry. Author David J. Goodwin presents a chronological micro-biography of Lovecraft’s New York years, emphasizing Lovecraft’s exploration of the city environment, the greater metropolitan region, and other locales and how they molded him as a writer and as an individual. Drawing from primary sources (letters, memoirs, and published personal reflections) and secondary sources (biographies and scholarship), Midnight Rambles develops a portrait of a talented and troubled author and offers insights into his unsettling beliefs on race, ethnicity, and immigration.Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Age Brings Reminiscences” | 1 1 “A Person of the Most Admirable Qualities” | 17 2 “An Eastern City of Wonder” | 32 3 “It Is a Myth; A Dream” | 51 4 “Brigham Young Annexing His 27th” | 67 5 “The Somewhat Disastrous Collapse” | 80 6 “A Maze of Poverty & Uncertainty” | 96 7 “A Pleasing Hermitage” | 114 8 “Circle of Aesthetic Dilettante” | 131 9 “Long Live the State of Rhode- Island” | 154 Conclusion: “The Merest Vague Dream” | 169 Acknowledgments | 181 Notes | 185 Bibliography | 251 Index | 269

Read more less