Literary studies: from c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisThe author of the acclaimed Gay Fiction Speaks brings us new interviews with twelve prominent gay writers who have emerged in the last decade. Hear Us Out demonstrates how in recent decades the canon of gay fiction has developed, diversified, and expanded its audience into the mainstream.Trade ReviewHear Us Out is going to become, like Richard Canning's previous book of interviews,Gay Fiction Speaks, a standard reference for scholars. That's an appropriately exalted, climate-controlled fate for a wonderful book... Canning has a wonderful knack for this work. -- David McConnell Lambda Book Report Canning offers up more of the meaty, critically rich interviews -- Christopher Hennessy The Gay and Lesbian ReviewTable of ContentsGary Indiana Bernard Cooper Christopher Bram Michael Cunningham Jim Grimsley Stephen McCauley Colm Toibin Paul Russell Peter Cameron Matthew Stadler Philip Hensher Dale Peck

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Book SynopsisFrom Egyptian cyberpunk to dubbed versions of Shrek in Iran, this book examines the emergence of new forms of culture in circulation and their geopolitical implications.Trade ReviewAfter the American Century offers a fascinating tour of the appropriation and deployment of American popular culture in a globalized, restless Middle East. From cinema and novels to hip-hop and comic books, this wonderfully written and richly observed book presents novel and exciting readings of familiar cultural forms in new political environments. -- Marc Lynch, author of The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East After the American Century is a book of exquisite audacity. Bold in its detailed precision and daring in its imaginative topography of topics, Brian T. Edwards's writing cuts through much noise and nuisance to lay bare what lies ahead. Its arguments do not just dismantle the imperial fantasy of an 'American century,' but point to the uncharted worlds far beyond its captured imagination. -- Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University This book is a rich account of what happens when cultural objects, literary texts, and films circulate between the Middle East and the United States: how they are interpreted and reinvented, in the process engendering new publics and counterpublics. A nuanced analysis of cultural politics that extends our understanding of the forms and limits of Western domination of the Middle East. -- Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject In After the American Century, Edwards has devised subtle, ethnographically informed reading methodologies to explain how anomalous logics of transnational circulation have radically undermined plans for a 'new American century.' The book will fast become indispensable to an understanding of the genealogy of transnational American studies. -- Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and founding director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College Edwards plunges into the cultural lives of Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran to illustrate the demise of one aspect of "the American century": the outsize influence that U.S. popular culture exercised in the Middle East. -- John Waterbury Foreign Affairs Edwards' background and considerable expertise shine... making the book a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the region. Middle East Journal Now that American power is receding across the globe it is a good time to ask how... methodologies might adapt to these new circumstances, and what we might name such an academic adaptation. Brian T. Edwards' important new book... provides us with a possible answer to this arguably urgent question. Post45 Ambitious, wide-ranging, and highly valuable. European Journal of American Culture Edwards challenges traditional narratives of US cultural imperialism... Highly recommended. CHOICE Edwards is to be commended for his ethnographic methods, his command of local languages, and the originality of his archive. International Journal of Middle East Studies A genuinely important contribution to our understanding of how American literary studies circulates internationally in the twenty-first century. American Literature A welcome work, valuable for its rich readings of unfamiliar yet important Middle Eastern artists and for its stimulating arguments about the transnational circulation of American culture in our global, digital age. Journal of American HistoryTable of ContentsPreface 1. After the American Century: Ends of Circulation 2. Jumping Publics: Egyptian Fictions of the Digital Age 3. "Argo Fuck Yourself": Iranian Cinema and the Curious Logics of Circulation 4. Coming Out in Casablanca: Shrek, Sex, and the Teen Pic in Contemporary Morocco Epilogue: Embracing Orientalism in the Homeland Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisFrom Egyptian cyberpunk to dubbed versions of Shrek in Iran, this book examines the emergence of new forms of culture in circulation and their geopolitical implications.Trade ReviewAfter the American Century offers a fascinating tour of the appropriation and deployment of American popular culture in a globalized, restless Middle East. From cinema and novels to hip-hop and comic books, this wonderfully written and richly observed book presents novel and exciting readings of familiar cultural forms in new political environments. -- Marc Lynch, author of The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East After the American Century is a book of exquisite audacity. Bold in its detailed precision and daring in its imaginative topography of topics, Brian T. Edwards's writing cuts through much noise and nuisance to lay bare what lies ahead. Its arguments do not just dismantle the imperial fantasy of an 'American century,' but point to the uncharted worlds far beyond its captured imagination. -- Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University This book is a rich account of what happens when cultural objects, literary texts, and films circulate between the Middle East and the United States: how they are interpreted and reinvented, in the process engendering new publics and counterpublics. A nuanced analysis of cultural politics that extends our understanding of the forms and limits of Western domination of the Middle East. -- Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject In After the American Century, Edwards has devised subtle, ethnographically informed reading methodologies to explain how anomalous logics of transnational circulation have radically undermined plans for a 'new American century.' The book will fast become indispensable to an understanding of the genealogy of transnational American studies. -- Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and founding director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College Edwards plunges into the cultural lives of Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran to illustrate the demise of one aspect of "the American century": the outsize influence that U.S. popular culture exercised in the Middle East. -- John Waterbury Foreign Affairs Edwards' background and considerable expertise shine... making the book a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the region. Middle East Journal Now that American power is receding across the globe it is a good time to ask how... methodologies might adapt to these new circumstances, and what we might name such an academic adaptation. Brian T. Edwards' important new book... provides us with a possible answer to this arguably urgent question. Post45 Ambitious, wide-ranging, and highly valuable. European Journal of American Culture Edwards challenges traditional narratives of US cultural imperialism... Highly recommended. CHOICE Edwards is to be commended for his ethnographic methods, his command of local languages, and the originality of his archive. International Journal of Middle East Studies A genuinely important contribution to our understanding of how American literary studies circulates internationally in the twenty-first century. American Literature A welcome work, valuable for its rich readings of unfamiliar yet important Middle Eastern artists and for its stimulating arguments about the transnational circulation of American culture in our global, digital age. Journal of American HistoryTable of ContentsPreface 1. After the American Century: Ends of Circulation 2. Jumping Publics: Egyptian Fictions of the Digital Age 3. "Argo Fuck Yourself": Iranian Cinema and the Curious Logics of Circulation 4. Coming Out in Casablanca: Shrek, Sex, and the Teen Pic in Contemporary Morocco Epilogue: Embracing Orientalism in the Homeland Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIslamophobia and the Novel analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice alongside changing concepts of cultural difference. Peter Morey offers readings of novels that show how their portrayal of difference both reflects and refutes the ideological preoccupations of the post-9/11 West.Trade ReviewWith his characteristic brilliance and integrity, Peter Morey, a noted public intellectual, illustrates the impact of surging Islamophobia on mainstream literature in this masterful study. A man whose career has centered on building bridges between divided cultures, his is a voice to heed in these confusing and troubled times. -- Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American UniversityIn a series of brilliantly astute and subtle readings, Peter Morey shows us how the contemporary novel has the capacity to expose the rifts and contradictions in Islamophobic discourses, thereby unsettling conventional frames for seeing Islam and Muslims. Paving the way for what Morey calls a ‘critical Muslim literary studies’, Islamophobia and the Novel is a work of outstanding scholarship, a vital book for the times we live in. -- Rehana Ahmed, Queen Mary University of LondonIf you’ve ever wondered why Muslim characters always seem so poorly imagined in so much contemporary fiction in English, Peter Morey has the answers for you. Islamophobia and the Novel is not only a lucid account of how Muslim characters get stuck in a spider’s web of representation. It is also a handbook for how to break free. -- Moustafa Bayoumi, Brooklyn CollegeA persuasive, theoretically grounded analysis of the state of literary novels in English dealing with the Muslim world and the West’s responses to (and uses of) Islamophobia. * Choice *Morey builds to that key conclusion with clarity. Understanding where literature stands in relation to Islamophobia is an initial and important step toward diminishing it. * Modern Philology *Strenuously researched and convincing...Islamophobia and the Novel invites us to understand the disquieting truths how Islamophobia is disseminated through discourse of representation, and how contemporary fiction has contributed to it. Morey’s remarkable research and his unbiased literary judgements push us to think afresh. * Wasafiri *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction—Islamophobia: The Word and the World1. Islam, Culture, and Anarchy: Faith, Doubt, and Liberalism in Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and John Updike2. From Multiculturalism to Islamophobia: Identity Politics and Individualism in Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali3. Muslim Misery Memoirs: The Truth Claims of Exotic Suffering in Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini4. Migrant Cartographies: Islamophobia and the Politics of the City Space in Amy Waldman and H. M. Naqvi5. States of Statelessness: Islamophobia and Border Spaces in the Post-9/11 Thrillers of John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan6. Islamophobia and the Global Novel: “Worlding” History in Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie7. Marketing the Muslim: Globalization and the Postsecular in Mohsin Hamid and Leila AboulelaConclusion—Toward a Critical Muslim Literary StudiesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHeather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in the age of climate crisis and informational overload. She argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises.Trade ReviewInfowhelm offers a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. -- Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of OregonIn prose that eschews jargon, Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world. She shows how data and science narratives interweave with literature, visual arts, and media arts to create new modes of thinking about the world that depend as much on feeling as ratiocination. Along the way she discusses "entangled epistemologies of the Infowhelm": how the arts help us to visualize hyperobjects and massive shifts in environment that seem beyond our understanding when couched only in scientific data. This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. -- Amy J. Elias, author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s FictionAmidst the swirl of data and other forms of information about the environment that saturate the contemporary world, Heather Houser finds a refuge of sorts in the work of artists who, making art of “scientific information,” help us make sense of it. In this remarkably creative and entrancing work, she shows how an aesthetic engagement with this information exposes the nature of the knowledge it produces not to reject it, but to allow for a profound grappling with it. With her magnificent prose and elegant analyses, Houser conveys the pleasure as well as the insights these artistic experiments produce, as we work to make sense of the “infowhelm” of the contemporary moment. This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced that phenomenon, which is to say for us all. -- Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak NarrativeIt would be nice if the accumulated ill effects of the positivist scientific mindset on the natural environment could be cancelled out by a simple turn to more innocent modes of thought. Heather Houser models an approach to the intertwined problems of quantification, scientific representation, and ecological consciousness at once more realistic and more imaginative than that. Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. This book will be of interest to a vast range of scholars working on contemporary culture and the environmental humanities. -- Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingHouser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry . . . [Infowhelm’s] synthesis of multiple artistic—literary and visual—works not only offers new ways of seeing environmental change, but also challenges traditional types of knowledge. * Orion Magazine *An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *A virtuosic reappraisal of art and information, during our era of ecological catastrophe . . . Infowhelm is ambitious, timely, and dynamic. It should take its place alongside the most consequential recent studies in ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and contemporary literature. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Environmental Art in the InfowhelmPart I. Cultural Climate KnowledgePreface1. Making Data Experiential2. Coming-of- Mind in Climate NarrativesPart II. The New Natural HistoryPreface3. Classifictions4. Visualizing Loss for a “Fragmented Survival”Part III. Aerial EnvironmentalismsPreface5. Environmental Aftermaths from the Sky6. The Afterlives of Information in Speculative FictionEpilogue: Can Thinking Make It So?AcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisHeather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in the age of climate crisis and informational overload. She argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises.Trade ReviewInfowhelm offers a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. -- Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of OregonIn prose that eschews jargon, Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world. She shows how data and science narratives interweave with literature, visual arts, and media arts to create new modes of thinking about the world that depend as much on feeling as ratiocination. Along the way she discusses "entangled epistemologies of the Infowhelm": how the arts help us to visualize hyperobjects and massive shifts in environment that seem beyond our understanding when couched only in scientific data. This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. -- Amy J. Elias, author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s FictionAmidst the swirl of data and other forms of information about the environment that saturate the contemporary world, Heather Houser finds a refuge of sorts in the work of artists who, making art of “scientific information,” help us make sense of it. In this remarkably creative and entrancing work, she shows how an aesthetic engagement with this information exposes the nature of the knowledge it produces not to reject it, but to allow for a profound grappling with it. With her magnificent prose and elegant analyses, Houser conveys the pleasure as well as the insights these artistic experiments produce, as we work to make sense of the “infowhelm” of the contemporary moment. This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced that phenomenon, which is to say for us all. -- Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak NarrativeIt would be nice if the accumulated ill effects of the positivist scientific mindset on the natural environment could be cancelled out by a simple turn to more innocent modes of thought. Heather Houser models an approach to the intertwined problems of quantification, scientific representation, and ecological consciousness at once more realistic and more imaginative than that. Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. This book will be of interest to a vast range of scholars working on contemporary culture and the environmental humanities. -- Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingHouser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry . . . [Infowhelm’s] synthesis of multiple artistic—literary and visual—works not only offers new ways of seeing environmental change, but also challenges traditional types of knowledge. * Orion Magazine *An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *A virtuosic reappraisal of art and information, during our era of ecological catastrophe . . . Infowhelm is ambitious, timely, and dynamic. It should take its place alongside the most consequential recent studies in ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and contemporary literature. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Environmental Art in the InfowhelmPart I. Cultural Climate KnowledgePreface1. Making Data Experiential2. Coming-of- Mind in Climate NarrativesPart II. The New Natural HistoryPreface3. Classifictions4. Visualizing Loss for a “Fragmented Survival”Part III. Aerial EnvironmentalismsPreface5. Environmental Aftermaths from the Sky6. The Afterlives of Information in Speculative FictionEpilogue: Can Thinking Make It So?AcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisJacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, and other forms of repetition.Trade ReviewMake It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, well-written, timely book about an important subject: a technical "mode of production" prominent in contemporary poetry, with its effects on content and reception. -- Haun Saussy, author of The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its TechnologiesMake It the Same offers a global perspective on cultural iteration, triangulating English-language poetry with Russian and Chinese practices. Edmond immediately underscores the unintended irony with which those in the United States speak of "the poetry world" to mean precisely the opposite of the global: a micro, naval-gazing echo chamber. Given how parochial literary communities around a genre can be, this is an especially important contribution to literary studies. -- Craig Dworkin, author of No MediumWith its revisionist echoes of Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a ‘copy poetry’ that remixes prior poetries in global trajectories outside Eurocentric, center/periphery literary studies. A path-breaking book for post-1950s literature! -- Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-MadisonA radical contribution to poetry studies. . . . Make It the Same should be celebrated not only for what the book does well—its subtle analyses of poems, its detailed knowledge of technology, its easy movement between English, Chinese, and Russian—but also for what it makes possible for scholars of poetry to do next. -- Walt Hunter * Los Angeles Review of Books *The flexibility of [Edmond’s] approach, his uncanny ability to extend the meanings of writing and reading, and his willingness to participate in the numerous digital frontier forms that poets in recent decades have sought to explore bear rich fruit. . . . Only a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach could have yielded such a timely vision. -- Martin Dyar * Times Higher Education *Make It the Same is lucidly written and meticulously researched....[and] establishes the terms for a vital reappraisal of cultural production in our present age. As such, it will be of close interest to scholars of contemporary literature and cultural studies, comparative and world literature, media studies, and the cultural history of information. * Modernism/Modernity *A breakthrough work of analysis, drawing from a range of critical fields to substantiate its case for the copy as a dominant global cultural form. It is a measure of Edmond’s contribution that Make It the Same will be required reading across the fields of modernist studies, contemporary historical poetics, and world literature, and a salient model for future transnational literary studies. * Review of English Studies *An important, fascinating and timely discussion of poetry of the iterative turn. * Landfall *A fascinating look at what poetry is becoming in the 21st century: it is subversive and regenerating like the tendrils of an octopus, always alive and seeking more ideas. * Choice *Make It the Same shows the author’s globe-spanning grasp of emergent and established poetries, understanding of a combination of theoretical persuasions, and persuasive deployment of a range of interpretive methods. * Cha *Edmond’s Make It the Same offers a significant rewriting of world literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, raising a series of important questions about language, form, circulation, and comparativity that will no doubt prove enabling for future scholarship. -- Sarah Dowling * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Edmond’s engaging and exciting book merits a wide readership by scholarsand students across literary and cultural studies. Innovative, thoroughly researched,and well-argued, this book is a remarkable study. * Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews *Students and scholars of literary conceptualism, experimental translation, cross-cultural collaboration, multilingualism, performance writing, visual poetry, artistic plagiarism, and digital poetics among other nonnormative modes of poiesis are bound to benefit from Edmond’s rich contextualizations and his method of what we might call “comparative iterature.” * Contemporary Literature *Edmond makes a compelling case for the contemporary avant-garde as a counterweight to more mainstream codex-based poetics that often privilege notions of original authorship. * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *A new moment in poetry criticism, one in which studies of form refigure the archive, undoing longstanding divisions between experimentation and expression. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Copy as Global Master Trope1. Postcolonial Media: Kamau Brathwaite’s Reel Revolution2. The Art of Samizdat: Dmitri Prigov, Moscow Conceptualism, and the Carbon-Copy Origins of New Media Poetics3. Making Waves in World Literature: Yang Lian and John Cayley’s Networked Collaboration4. Shibboleth: The Border Crossings of Caroline Bergvall, Performance Writing, and Iterative Poetics5. Copy Rights: Conceptual Writing, the Mongrel Coalition, and the Racial Politics of Digital Media6. Chinese Rooms: The Work of Poetry in an Age of Global Languages, Machine Translation, and Automatic EstrangementRecapitulations: Repetition and Revolution in World PoetryNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisJacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, and other forms of repetition.Trade ReviewMake It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, well-written, timely book about an important subject: a technical "mode of production" prominent in contemporary poetry, with its effects on content and reception. -- Haun Saussy, author of The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its TechnologiesMake It the Same offers a global perspective on cultural iteration, triangulating English-language poetry with Russian and Chinese practices. Edmond immediately underscores the unintended irony with which those in the United States speak of "the poetry world" to mean precisely the opposite of the global: a micro, naval-gazing echo chamber. Given how parochial literary communities around a genre can be, this is an especially important contribution to literary studies. -- Craig Dworkin, author of No MediumWith its revisionist echoes of Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a ‘copy poetry’ that remixes prior poetries in global trajectories outside Eurocentric, center/periphery literary studies. A path-breaking book for post-1950s literature! -- Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-MadisonA radical contribution to poetry studies. . . . Make It the Same should be celebrated not only for what the book does well—its subtle analyses of poems, its detailed knowledge of technology, its easy movement between English, Chinese, and Russian—but also for what it makes possible for scholars of poetry to do next. -- Walt Hunter * Los Angeles Review of Books *The flexibility of [Edmond’s] approach, his uncanny ability to extend the meanings of writing and reading, and his willingness to participate in the numerous digital frontier forms that poets in recent decades have sought to explore bear rich fruit. . . . Only a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach could have yielded such a timely vision. -- Martin Dyar * Times Higher Education *Make It the Same is lucidly written and meticulously researched....[and] establishes the terms for a vital reappraisal of cultural production in our present age. As such, it will be of close interest to scholars of contemporary literature and cultural studies, comparative and world literature, media studies, and the cultural history of information. * Modernism/Modernity *A breakthrough work of analysis, drawing from a range of critical fields to substantiate its case for the copy as a dominant global cultural form. It is a measure of Edmond’s contribution that Make It the Same will be required reading across the fields of modernist studies, contemporary historical poetics, and world literature, and a salient model for future transnational literary studies. * Review of English Studies *An important, fascinating and timely discussion of poetry of the iterative turn. * Landfall *A fascinating look at what poetry is becoming in the 21st century: it is subversive and regenerating like the tendrils of an octopus, always alive and seeking more ideas. * Choice *Make It the Same shows the author’s globe-spanning grasp of emergent and established poetries, understanding of a combination of theoretical persuasions, and persuasive deployment of a range of interpretive methods. * Cha *Edmond’s Make It the Same offers a significant rewriting of world literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, raising a series of important questions about language, form, circulation, and comparativity that will no doubt prove enabling for future scholarship. -- Sarah Dowling * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Edmond’s engaging and exciting book merits a wide readership by scholarsand students across literary and cultural studies. Innovative, thoroughly researched,and well-argued, this book is a remarkable study. * Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews *Students and scholars of literary conceptualism, experimental translation, cross-cultural collaboration, multilingualism, performance writing, visual poetry, artistic plagiarism, and digital poetics among other nonnormative modes of poiesis are bound to benefit from Edmond’s rich contextualizations and his method of what we might call “comparative iterature.” * Contemporary Literature *Edmond makes a compelling case for the contemporary avant-garde as a counterweight to more mainstream codex-based poetics that often privilege notions of original authorship. * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *A new moment in poetry criticism, one in which studies of form refigure the archive, undoing longstanding divisions between experimentation and expression. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Copy as Global Master Trope1. Postcolonial Media: Kamau Brathwaite’s Reel Revolution2. The Art of Samizdat: Dmitri Prigov, Moscow Conceptualism, and the Carbon-Copy Origins of New Media Poetics3. Making Waves in World Literature: Yang Lian and John Cayley’s Networked Collaboration4. Shibboleth: The Border Crossings of Caroline Bergvall, Performance Writing, and Iterative Poetics5. Copy Rights: Conceptual Writing, the Mongrel Coalition, and the Racial Politics of Digital Media6. Chinese Rooms: The Work of Poetry in an Age of Global Languages, Machine Translation, and Automatic EstrangementRecapitulations: Repetition and Revolution in World PoetryNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHart's eight collection of poems, Barefoot draws on Christianity and the rich heritage of American Blues, creating a blend of religious poetry and love poetry.Trade Review“Kevin Hart’s Barefoot is a magnificent book. Hart’s poetry has always been marked by a tenderness and sensuality and an openness to existence, and it remains so here, but that openness now extends to the negative aspects of existence, which make the book both exhilarating and harrowing. I think that Barefoot is one of Kevin Hart’s finest achievements.” —John Koethe, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee“One of the finest poets now writing in English, Kevin Hart beautifully and indelibly surveys the human position—not only our body-life in time, but also our apprehensions of what lies beyond us. The title of his marvelous new collection, Barefoot, perfectly expresses its openness, freedom, power, and delight.” —David Mason, author of The Sound: New and Selected Poems“One of the strengths of this book is Hart’s penetrating lucidity and his passionate ideas. He is a master craftsman with a visionary imagination and these are his finest poems.” —Robert Adamson, CAL Chair in Poetry, University of Technology Sydney"When I read Kevin Hart, I feel less alone, which is to say that I feel that someone understands my own desire to be alone. I feel a companion spirit, out there wandering barefoot in the darkness, looking for God. But this does not mean that the experience is entirely comforting; this is not some faux-poetry of greeting-card consolation." —Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books"In Kevin Hart’s eighth book of poetry, he uses poetry to talk to the absent or, rather, the ambiguously present: his late father, God, past lovers, and versions of himself. . . . Like many mystics before him, Hart often speaks of the divine in erotic terms." —World Literature Today“Kevin Hart’s Christianity is ever present even as he writes passionately of young love, titillation, and ‘thin girls who taste of Beaujolais at night.’ That he is comfortable with grief, mystery, solemnity, biblical and classical history, and humility instills his work with rare depth.” —Foreword Reviews

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Book SynopsisForegrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage.Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Critical Visions Penny Farfan I. Replaying the Canon 1. Feminist Adaptations / Adaptations of Feminism: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad Penny Farfan 2. Indigenizing the Colonial Narrative: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife Denise Varney 3. Does Revenge Fall Softly? YaËl Farber’s Molora Catherine Cole 4. Indecent Collaborations and / in Queer Time(s) Katie N. Johnson and Sara L. Warner II. Representing Histories 5. The Bloodstained Distance: Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box Alisa Solomon 6. Unmaking a Devil’s Bargain: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars and the Idea of America Soyica Diggs Colbert and Robert J. Patterson 7. “A Change Is Gonna Come?” Protest and Racial Progress in debbie tucker green’s ear for eye Lynette Goddard 8. Maternal Agency and Reproductive Justice in Lisa Loomer’s Roe Sharon L. Green III. Staging Lives 9. The Mythic Migrant, the Witnessing Self: HÉlÈne Cixous and Le Dernier CaravansÉrail: OdyssÉes Emine Fisek 10. Exceptional Embodiment in Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy Ryan Claycomb 11. Acting and Reenacting the Malvinas/Falklands War in Lola Arias’s Minefield/Campo minado Paola S. HernÁndez 12. Fun Home: Lesbian Feminism Meets Broadway Musical Theatre Stacy Wolf IV. Re-imagining Family 13. A ‘rock inside the flesh’: Motherwork in Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women Karen Bamford and Sheila Rabillard 14. Quiara Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful and the Dramaturgy of Free Jazz Natalie Alvarez and Jimena Ortuzar 15. British Muslim Feminism and the Marriage Trap: Alia Bano’s Shades Meenakshi Ponnuswami 16. Lesbian Interspecies Performance: Holly Hughes’s The Dog and Pony Show (bring your own pony) Kim Marra V. Navigating Communities 17. Bread of Life: Whiti Hereaka’s Rewena Diana Looser 18. Transcultural Memory and Food in Julia Cho’s Aubergine Esther Kim Lee 19. Truth and Absurdity on the London Stage: Liwaa Yazji’s Goats and its Audiences Margaret Litvin with Liwaa Yazji 20. “I Will Tend Your Garden”: The Terms of Proximity in Grace PassÔ’s Por Elise Honey Crawford VI. Articulating Intersections 21. Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root: Intersectionality and the Jena Six Juliet Guzzetta 22. Economic Disenfranchisement and Gender Inequality in Emma Dante’s mPalermu Francesca Spedalieri 23. The Magic of Change: Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s The World of Extreme Happiness Xing Fan 24. “But nostalgia’s a disease”: Viewing Lynn Nottage’s Sweat in the Age of Trump Courtney Elkin Mohler VII. New World Order(s) 25. Miss Piggy the Seer in the Land of Trump’s Blind: Elfriede Jelinek’s On the Royal Road: The Burgher King Sue-Ellen Case 26. Has She “Escaped Alone” to Tell Us? Caryl Churchill: ‘Messenger’ for the Twenty-First Century Rosemary Malague 27. Climate Change and the Capitalocene in Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole Wendy Arons 28. The Ghosts of Greenham Common in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children Lesley Ferris Afterwords: Emerging Currents: Fighting on Two Fronts Lesley Ferris Notes on Contributors

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Book SynopsisForegrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage.Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Critical Visions Penny Farfan I. Replaying the Canon 1. Feminist Adaptations / Adaptations of Feminism: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad Penny Farfan 2. Indigenizing the Colonial Narrative: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife Denise Varney 3. Does Revenge Fall Softly? YaËl Farber’s Molora Catherine Cole 4. Indecent Collaborations and / in Queer Time(s) Katie N. Johnson and Sara L. Warner II. Representing Histories 5. The Bloodstained Distance: Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box Alisa Solomon 6. Unmaking a Devil’s Bargain: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars and the Idea of America Soyica Diggs Colbert and Robert J. Patterson 7. “A Change Is Gonna Come?” Protest and Racial Progress in debbie tucker green’s ear for eye Lynette Goddard 8. Maternal Agency and Reproductive Justice in Lisa Loomer’s Roe Sharon L. Green III. Staging Lives 9. The Mythic Migrant, the Witnessing Self: HÉlÈne Cixous and Le Dernier CaravansÉrail: OdyssÉes Emine Fisek 10. Exceptional Embodiment in Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy Ryan Claycomb 11. Acting and Reenacting the Malvinas/Falklands War in Lola Arias’s Minefield/Campo minado Paola S. HernÁndez 12. Fun Home: Lesbian Feminism Meets Broadway Musical Theatre Stacy Wolf IV. Re-imagining Family 13. A ‘rock inside the flesh’: Motherwork in Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women Karen Bamford and Sheila Rabillard 14. Quiara Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful and the Dramaturgy of Free Jazz Natalie Alvarez and Jimena Ortuzar 15. British Muslim Feminism and the Marriage Trap: Alia Bano’s Shades Meenakshi Ponnuswami 16. Lesbian Interspecies Performance: Holly Hughes’s The Dog and Pony Show (bring your own pony) Kim Marra V. Navigating Communities 17. Bread of Life: Whiti Hereaka’s Rewena Diana Looser 18. Transcultural Memory and Food in Julia Cho’s Aubergine Esther Kim Lee 19. Truth and Absurdity on the London Stage: Liwaa Yazji’s Goats and its Audiences Margaret Litvin with Liwaa Yazji 20. “I Will Tend Your Garden”: The Terms of Proximity in Grace PassÔ’s Por Elise Honey Crawford VI. Articulating Intersections 21. Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root: Intersectionality and the Jena Six Juliet Guzzetta 22. Economic Disenfranchisement and Gender Inequality in Emma Dante’s mPalermu Francesca Spedalieri 23. The Magic of Change: Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s The World of Extreme Happiness Xing Fan 24. “But nostalgia’s a disease”: Viewing Lynn Nottage’s Sweat in the Age of Trump Courtney Elkin Mohler VII. New World Order(s) 25. Miss Piggy the Seer in the Land of Trump’s Blind: Elfriede Jelinek’s On the Royal Road: The Burgher King Sue-Ellen Case 26. Has She “Escaped Alone” to Tell Us? Caryl Churchill: ‘Messenger’ for the Twenty-First Century Rosemary Malague 27. Climate Change and the Capitalocene in Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole Wendy Arons 28. The Ghosts of Greenham Common in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children Lesley Ferris Afterwords: Emerging Currents: Fighting on Two Fronts Lesley Ferris Notes on Contributors

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive introduction to British fiction from 1979 to the present. The volume outlines the main developments in contemporary fiction and engages with key themes such as cultural identity, gender, myth and history, postcolonialism and urban culture.Trade Review"[An] insightful, perceptive and nuanced analysis ... the collection is a landmark in the critical analysis of current literary culture." Times Higher Education Supplement "I was impressed by the range and conscientious skill of the critics... this collection discusses much of the best in contemporary British writing, and deserves to be successful." Sir Frank Kermode, formerly King Edward Professor of English at Cambridge "An admirably ambitious attempt to map the contemporary literary scene, impressive both in the range and the depth of its coverage. Certainly the sharpest and most up-to-date book I have read on the subject." Jonathan CoeTable of ContentsNotes on Contributors. General Introduction: Contemporary British Fiction. (Rod Mengham). Part I: Myth and History. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 1. Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy . (John Brannigan). 2. The Fiction of Jim Crace. (Richard J. Lane). 3. The Novels of Graham Swift. (Tamas Benyei). 4. The Fiction of Iain Sinclair. (Rod Mengham). Part II: Urban Thematics. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 5. The Fiction of Will Self. (Liorah Anne Golomb). 6. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia. (Anthony Ilona). 7. Zadie Smith's White Teeth. (Dominic Head). 8. The Fiction of A. L. Kennedy. (Philip Tew). Part III: Cultural Hybridity. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 9. Salman Rushdie. (Stephen Baker). 10. The Fiction of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. (Drew Milne). 11. Caryl Phillips. (Brad Buchanan). Part IV: Pathological Subjects. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 12. The Fiction of Angela Carter. (Robert Eaglestone). 13. Jeanette Winterson's Evolving Subject. (Kim Middleton Meyer). 14. Kazuo Ishiguro and the Work of Art. (Mark Wormald). 15. The Fiction of Martin Amis. (James Diedrick). Glossary of Major Theoretical Sources. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). Index.

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Book SynopsisIn this first study of novelist Elizabeth Strout's best-selling works, Katherine Montwieler reveals how Strout's voice, characters, and themes generate a powerful empathic response among mainstream readersmostly womenthat elite scholars undervalue at their own peril. This accessible companion also includes an exclusive interview with Strout.Trade Review“Companion is the appropriate word for Katherine Montwieler’s study of the works of Elizabeth Strout. With her careful analysis and gentle invitation to notice, among other things, the ‘quiet kindnesses, unexpected acts of grace’ of Strout’s characters, the author makes space in this book for enthusiastic readers, fans, and scholars alike to honor Strout’s stories and their centrality to our contemporary literary landscape."

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Book SynopsisExamines Irish novels of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence in works of fiction. McGlynn argues that they are reflecting and responding to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity.

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Book SynopsisChronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II - creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy the world, but to save it. The book asks what happens to these landscapes after the madness and destruction. What monsters and magic surface then?

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Book SynopsisForms of a World argues that poetic innovations of contemporary Anglophone poetry shape and are shaped by global forces. The poets in this book sense these conditions before they are made fully present and offer various responses to global transformation.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 1. Stolen Landscapes: The Investments of the Ode and the Politics of Land 19 2. Let Us Go: Lyric and the Transit of Citizenship 44 3. The Crowd to Come: Poetic Exhortations from Brooklyn to Kashmir 65 4. The No-Prospect Poem: Poetic Views of the Anthropocene 90 Coda 119 Acknowledgments 129 Notes 133 Bibliography 165 Index 183

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Book SynopsisForms of a World argues that poetic innovations of contemporary Anglophone poetry shape and are shaped by global forces. The poets in this book sense these conditions before they are made fully present and offer various responses to global transformation.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 1. Stolen Landscapes: The Investments of the Ode and the Politics of Land 19 2. Let Us Go: Lyric and the Transit of Citizenship 44 3. The Crowd to Come: Poetic Exhortations from Brooklyn to Kashmir 65 4. The No-Prospect Poem: Poetic Views of the Anthropocene 90 Coda 119 Acknowledgments 129 Notes 133 Bibliography 165 Index 183

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Book SynopsisBringing together top scholars in the field, Universality and Social Policy in Canada provides an overview of the universality principle in social welfare.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Understanding Universality DANIEL BÉLAND, GREGORY P. MARCHILDON, AND MICHAEL J. PRINCE 1 Placing Universality in Canadian Social Policy and Politics MICHAEL J. PRINCE 2 Equalization and the Fiscal Foundation of Universality P.E. BRYDEN 3 The Single-Tier Universality of Canadian Medicare GREGORY P. MARCHILDON 4 Elementary and Secondary Education: The First Universal Social Program in Canada JENNIFER WALLNER AND GREGORY P. MARCHILDON 5 From Family Allowances to the Struggle for Universal Childcare in Canada RIANNE MAHON WITH MICHAEL J. PRINCE 6 Universality and the Erosion of Old Age Security DANIEL BÉLAND AND PATRIK MARIER 7 Common Differences: The Universalism of Disability and Unevenness of Public Policy MICHAEL J. PRINCE 8 Segmented Citizenship: Indigenous Peoples and the Limits of Universality MARTIN PAPILLON 9 Universality and Immigration: Differential Access to Social Programs and Societal Inclusion TRACY SMITH-CARRIER 10 Universality and Social Policy in the United Kingdom ALEX WADDAN AND DANIEL BÉLAND 11 Universal Social Policy in Sweden PAULA BLOMQVIST AND DANIEL BÉLAND Conclusion: Resiliencies, Paradoxes, and Lessons GREGORY P. MARCHILDON, DANIEL BÉLAND, AND MICHAEL J. PRINCE List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisTim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley’s accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce’s work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten uses for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind ourTrade Review"...Conley’s insatiable appetite to read Joyce for his usefulness enriches our understanding of his texts and will provoke further research and inquiry." -- Eleni Loukopoulou, Independent Scholar * James Joyce Quarterly, vol 55 no 1-3, Spring/Summer '18 *"Useless Joyce provides an implicit defense of literary pleasure, with the teacher-critic serving as mediator of that pleasure." -- Mark Wollaeger * James Joyce Literary Supplement, Fall 2018 *‘Highly recommended.’ -- R.D. Newman * Choice Magazine vol 55:10:2018 *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Note on Abbreviations Introduction Part One: Textual Functions Chapter 1: Guidance Systems Chapter 2: Misquoting Joyce Chapter 3: Limited Editions, Edited Limitations Chapter 4: Translation, Annotation, Hesitation Part Two: Cultural Appropriations Chapter 5: Make a Stump Speech of It Chapter 6: Win a Dream Date with James Joyce Chapter 7: The Stephen Dedalus Diet Conclusion: Means without End Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisBeing Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland’s return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland’s cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland’s modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.Trade Review"Although designed to cater to the needs of students of Polish studies and literature, this volume will also be of great use to all scholars interested in central and eastern European history, culture, and literature, and indeed to the general public." -- Aleksandra Witczak Haugstad, Research Council of Norway * H-Net Reviews (H-Poland) *"In 2006, several scholars decided to do something about the lack of a comprehensive, up-to-date, research-based work dealing with Polish literature and culture. It took over a decade to complete this ambitious project of delivering a new and updated history of this vast subject for a non-Polish speaking audience…the result of the combined efforts of sixty scholars from both sides of the Atlantic is both impressive and voluminous." -- Aleksandra Witczak Haugstad, Research Council of Norway * H-Net, HABSBURG *Table of Contents1. Transitions 2. Strategies 3. Transmissions 4. Genres and Their Discontents 5. Postwar and Post-1989 Drama 6. Essay 7. Diaries 8. Reportage 9. Literary Theory 10. Film 11. Popular Culture 12. Mass Media

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Book SynopsisIn American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle, Kirsten MacLeod examines the rise of a new print media form – the little magazine – and its relationship to the transformation of American cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Though the little magazine has long been regarded as the preserve of modernist avant-gardes and elite artistic coteries, for whom it served as a form of resistance to mass media, MacLeod’s detailed study of its origins paints a different picture. Combining cultural, textual, literary, and media studies criticism, MacLeod demonstrates how the little magazine was deeply connected to the artistic, social, political, and cultural interests of a rising professional-managerial class. She offers a richly contextualized analysis of the little magazine’s position in the broader media landscape: namely, its relationship to old and new media, including pre-industrial print forms, newspapers, mass-market magazines, fine pr

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Book SynopsisReaders, literary critics, and theorists alike have long demonstrated an abiding fascination with the author, both as a real person—an artist and creator—and as a theoretical concept that shapes the way we read literary works. Whether anonymous, pseudonymous, or trending on social media, authors continue to be an object of critical and readerly interest. Yet theories surrounding authorship have yet to be satisfactorily updated to register the changes wrought on the literary sphere by the advent of the digital age, the recent turn to autofiction, and the current literary climate more generally. In Reading the Contemporary Author the contributors look back on the long history of theorizing the author and offer innovative new approaches for understanding this elusive figure. Mapping the contours of the vast territory that is contemporary authorship, this collection investigates authorship in the context of narrative genres ranging from memoir and autobiograpTrade Review“A brilliant exploration of new manifestations of authorship in the twenty-first century. Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King provide a powerful through line that reveals transformations in how we approach the subjectivity and intent of the author amid the digital revolution, the relation to identity politics, complex interactions of fact and fiction, and the role of authorial reflexivity as a process of epistemological and self-examination that extends beyond metafictional play. Through an original outside-in structure, Reading the Contemporary Author is a compelling narratological inquiry into how changing concepts of the author have played a central, mediating role in how we read and interpret the increasingly uncertain thresholds of texts and contemporary life.”—Virginia Newhall Rademacher, author of Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative“The articles in this valuable work provide a foray into the multifarious nature of contemporary authorship, demonstrating that, although our conception of authorship has taken many forms and will take many more, the author always remains a pivotal, often controversial, site of analysis.”—Marjorie Worthington, author of The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction“An important contribution to the knowledge of contemporary authorship but also to contemporary narrativity and contemporary narrative genres, including biofiction, autofiction, memoir, novels featuring novelist narrators, and more.”—Sylvie Patron, author of The Narrator: A Problem in Narrative TheoryTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgements Introduction: Authorship in Literary Criticism and Narrative TheoryElizabeth King and Alison Gibbons PART I: THE AUTHOR ON THE WORLD STAGE: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS 1. The Public Intellectual on Stage: Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieOdile Heynders 2. The Pseudonymic Author and Elena Ferrante’s Evasions of GenderJaclyn Partyka 3. The Permissible Author: Cultural Politics and the Market Economy of the Literary SphereChristopher González PART II: THE AUTHOR IN THE MIRROR: AUTO-AUTHORSHIP, MEMOIR, AND THE NARRATING ‘I’ 4. Authorship and AutobiographyArnaud Schmitt 5. “I wanted to be present to hear her last words”: A Cognitive Approach to Multimodal Autobiographical ElegyAlison Gibbons 6. The Author as a Work of Art: Graphic Memoir, Style, and Authorial AgentsNancy Pedri 7. Radical Realism and Modes of Fictionality in Contemporary Auto/Biographical LiteratureFiona Doloughan PART III: THE AUTHOR ON THE PAGE: REPRESENTATIONS OF AUTHORSHIP IN FICTION 8. Reconstructing the Author through Biofiction’s Anchored ImaginationMichael Lackey and Laura Cernat 9. The Anxiety of Authorship: Novelists as NarratorsPaul Dawson 10. Dead Authors Tell No Tales: The Ailing Author-Character in Contemporary Novels about NovelistsElizabeth King CODA 11. The Author beyond ‘the implied author’: From Postclassical to Postcritical NarratologyStefan Kjerkegaard ContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisA timely anthology that examines, interrogates, and critiques representations of race and difference across various Harry Potter media, including books, films, and official websites, as well as online forums and the classroom.

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Book SynopsisA timely anthology that examines, interrogates, and critiques representations of race and difference across various Harry Potter media, including books, films, and official websites, as well as online forums and the classroom.

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Book SynopsisPresents a collection of twenty-two interviews, each conducted during the ten-year span in which Karl Ove Knausgaard’s literary prowess gained worldwide recognition. Knausgaard is both a daring writer and a daring interviewee, grounding his observations in the ordinary aspects of the world around him.

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Book SynopsisPresents a collection of twenty-two interviews, each conducted during the ten-year span in which Karl Ove Knausgaard’s literary prowess gained worldwide recognition. Knausgaard is both a daring writer and a daring interviewee, grounding his observations in the ordinary aspects of the world around him.

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

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Book SynopsisA timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our worldWhy would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.Trade Review "Training for Catastrophe reveals how science fictional narratives habitually assume that, no matter what happens, the further expansion of the security state in the name of ‘preparedness’ and safety is the first, last, and only possible response to crisis. Lindsay Thomas calls on us to think outside the fantasies of total surveillance and maximum control that dominate contemporary visions of the future—and the apocalypse will never be the same."—Gerry Canavan, president, Science Fiction Research Association "In Training for Catastrophe, Lindsay Thomas chronicles how the national security state uses fiction to shape public perception about risk, security, preparedness, and the future and with what consequences. This timely and important work shows how preparedness documents at once produce a false sense of security and reproduce the inequities of structural racism. It is a must read for the contemporary moment."—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative "This book would benefit any cross-disciplinary analysis within the humanities, as it skillfully interweaves political science and media, cultural, and literary studies."—Critical Studies on Terrorism "Thomas’s writing is clear, and she deftly weaves together scholarship from the fields of literary and security studies."—Modern Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Prepare Yourself1. Training in an Empiricist Epistemology of Fiction2. Realism: Consenting to the Possibilistic Logic of Preparedness3. Thinking Generically: The Professional Management of Disaster4. Character: The Resilience of the Hero5. Looking for the Plot: Counterterrorism and the Hermeneutics of SuspicionEpilogue: The Uses of FictionAcknowledgmentsNotes Index

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Book SynopsisA timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our worldWhy would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.Trade Review "Training for Catastrophe reveals how science fictional narratives habitually assume that, no matter what happens, the further expansion of the security state in the name of ‘preparedness’ and safety is the first, last, and only possible response to crisis. Lindsay Thomas calls on us to think outside the fantasies of total surveillance and maximum control that dominate contemporary visions of the future—and the apocalypse will never be the same."—Gerry Canavan, president, Science Fiction Research Association "In Training for Catastrophe, Lindsay Thomas chronicles how the national security state uses fiction to shape public perception about risk, security, preparedness, and the future and with what consequences. This timely and important work shows how preparedness documents at once produce a false sense of security and reproduce the inequities of structural racism. It is a must read for the contemporary moment."—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative "This book would benefit any cross-disciplinary analysis within the humanities, as it skillfully interweaves political science and media, cultural, and literary studies."—Critical Studies on Terrorism "Thomas’s writing is clear, and she deftly weaves together scholarship from the fields of literary and security studies."—Modern Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Prepare Yourself1. Training in an Empiricist Epistemology of Fiction2. Realism: Consenting to the Possibilistic Logic of Preparedness3. Thinking Generically: The Professional Management of Disaster4. Character: The Resilience of the Hero5. Looking for the Plot: Counterterrorism and the Hermeneutics of SuspicionEpilogue: The Uses of FictionAcknowledgmentsNotes Index

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

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Book SynopsisNew essays exploring the resurgence of the theme of romantic relationships and love in German literature since around the turn of the millennium. While sociologists have long agreed that the problems of modern and contemporary subjectivity crystallize in the issue of romantic relationships and love (e.g., Luhmann, Illouz, Beck, etc.), the theme of love, so crucial to the foundational text of modern German literature, Goethe's Werther, all but disappeared from German prose literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet over the past fifteen years German-language literature has witnessed an explosion of novels with "Liebe" in their titles as well as novels that centrally focus on intersubjective erotic and emotional relationships. A number of major contemporary writers (Treichel, Walser, Kermani, Ortheil, Maron, Zaimoglu, Genazino) have written Liebesromane or novels in which significant sociohistorical questions are refracted through the love relationships of their protagonists. German film likewise has increasingly thematized love relationships under postromantic conditions, e.g. in the films of the Berlin school. Simultaneously, the development of both feminist and LGBTQ politics over the past decades has exploded the heteronormative discourses ofdesire in a way that has both expanded and enriched the lovers' discourse, while recent developments of urban (hetero)sexuality have expanded the previously available models of expressing erotic relationships in ways that are reminiscent of the utopian ending of Goethe's first version of Stella. The present collection offers a wide-ranging set of essays on these developments. Contributors: Esther K. Bauer, Sven Glawion, Silke Horstkotte,Sarra Kassem, Maria Roca Lizarazu, Helmut Schmitz, Angelika Vybiral. Helmut Schmitz is Reader in German at the University of Warwick. Peter Davies is Professor and Head of German at the University of Edinburgh.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Love, Literature, (Post-)Modernity: On the Re-Emergence of Love in Contemporary German Literature - Helmut Schmitz Not so Happily Ever After: Romantic Love in Novels by Alain Claude Sulze - Esther K. Bauer Love as Literature: Hanns-Josef Ortheil's Die große Liebe - Helmut Schmitz Healthy Socialists and Kinky Heroes: Carnivalesque Deconstruction of Heteronormativity in Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir - Sven Glawion Disembodied Love and Desire: Virtual Love in Daniel Glattauer's Gut gegen Nordwind - Angelika Vybiral Thomas Mann in Furs: Remediations of Sadomasochism in Maxim Biller's Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz and Harlem Holocaust - Maria Roca Lizarazu Precarious Subjects, Vulnerable Love: Thomas Melle's 3000 Euro, Feridun Zaimoglu's Isabel and Julia Wolf's Alles ist jetzt - Silke Horstkotte Love as Anathema: Social Constraints and the Demise of Desire in Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand - Sarra Kassem

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Book SynopsisOffers techniques for teaching modern Latin American poetry in college courses, including considerations of teaching the silva, human rights, poetry in indigenous Languages, community-based learning, lesser-known contemporary poetry, Afro-descendant poetry, performance, the long poem, and queer theory. Provides classroom exercises and assignments.Trade ReviewThis is more than a guide for literature and Spanish-Language classrooms-it is a resource for other disciplines as well . . . an indispensable resource." - Juan Pablo Lupi, University of California, Santa Barbara

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Book SynopsisPoetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism examines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present. Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.

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Book SynopsisAlgorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot points in tales of the political economy. In Profiles and Plotlines, Katherine Johnston engages this energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Fiction and poetry are capable of addressing precisely that for which algorithms cannot or do not account: the effects of profile culture; the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data; the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched; and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Johnston analyzes prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable.Trade Review“This magnificent book mobilizes contemporary fiction and poetry to confront the unequal effects of surveillance-based profiling. Literature tracks growing apprehension about the datafication of everyday life, but, as Katherine Johnston shows, literature can also provide insight into the rhetorical and partial nature of all data profiling.”—Torin Monahan, author, Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance“Profiles and Plotlines is a tour de force. Surveillance—corporate, state, or domestic—is one of the key issues of our time. Katherine Johnston deftly guides readers through a wealth of material as she explains how literature encounters/incarnates data. A triumph.”—Toby Miller, author, A COVID Charter, A Better World“Johnston’s sharp analyses of contemporary American literature distinguishes the prevalence of a datafied and quantified culture. Her unique blending of literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies highlights the ways in which the reciprocal relationship between algorithms and stories has recreated how we understand character profiling in our information society.”—Joelle Mann, author, Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral

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Book SynopsisEver since his first novel, Fight Club, was made into a cult film by David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk has been a consistent presence on the New York Times best-seller list. A target of critics but a fan favorite, Palahniuk has been loathed and loved in equal measure for his dark humor, edgy topics, and confrontational writing style. In close readings of Fight Club and the thirteen novels that this controversial author has published since, Douglas Keesey argues that Palahniuk is much more than a “shock jock” engaged in mere sensationalism. His visceral depictions of sex and violence have social, psychological, and religious significance. Keesey takes issue with reviewers who accuse Palahniuk of being an angry nihilist and a misanthrope, showing instead that he is really a romantic at heart and a believer in community. In this first comprehensive introduction to Palahniuk’s fiction, Keesey reveals how this writer’s outrageous narratives are actually rooted in his own personal experiences, how his seemingly unprecedented works are part of the American literary tradition of protagonists in search of an identity, and how his negative energy is really social satire directed at specific ills that he diagnoses and wishes to cure. After tracing the influence of his working-class background, his journalistic education, and his training as a “minimalist” writer, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk exposes connections between the writer’s novels by grouping them thematically: the struggle for identity (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke); the horror trilogy (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted); teen terrors (Rant, Pygmy); porn bodies and romantic myths (Snuff, Tell-All, Beautiful You); and a decidedly unorthodox revision of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Damned, Doomed).Drawing on numerous author interviews and written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk should appeal to scholars, students, and fans alike.

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Book Synopsis Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: A Consumer's Dystopia Chapter Two: The Consuming Self Chapter Three: Consumer Culture's "Collateral Damage" Chapter Four: A Consumer's Dreams and Nightmares Chapter Five: Working-Class Consumption Consuming Together Aesthetic Interruptions of the Mundane Low and High Tactical Consumption Conclusion Conclusiom Notes Works Cited Index

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Book Synopsis Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: A Consumer's Dystopia Chapter Two: The Consuming Self Chapter Three: Consumer Culture's "Collateral Damage" Chapter Four: A Consumer's Dreams and Nightmares Chapter Five: Working-Class Consumption Consuming Together Aesthetic Interruptions of the Mundane Low and High Tactical Consumption Conclusion Conclusiom Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisExplores the process of "becoming woman" through an analysis of the depiction of girls and young women in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts. What does it mean to "become woman" in the context of neoliberalism and postfeminism? What is the role of will in this process? Willful Girls explores these questions through an analysis of the depiction of girls and youngwomen in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts. It identifies four sets of concerns that are vital for an understanding of gendered subject formation in the contemporary context: agency and volition; body and beauty; sisterhood and identification; and sex and desire. The book examines numerous nonfiction feminist texts as well as novels by Helene Hegemann, Caitlin Moran, Charlotte Roche, Emma Jane Unsworth, Kate Zambreno, and Juli Zeh, among others. These texts illustrate the complex processes by which female subjects become women today. Failure, refusal, disgust, and anger are striking features of these becomings. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed (Willful Subjects) and thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Rosi Braidotti, and Elizabeth Grosz, the book demonstrates the significance of willfulness for understandings and assertions of female agency. In addition, it proposesa view of literary works themselves as instances of willfulness. The book will be of interest to scholars working in comparative literature, English, German studies, and feminist, gender, and queer studies. Emily Jeremiah is Senior Lecturer in German and Gender Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.Trade ReviewAn intricate and important work of literary criticism which will be of interest to scholars, students, and those curious about contemporary feminisms across national and linguistic boundaries. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[T]his book [is] a useful corrective to the excessive focus on 'adult models of subjectivity' (2) that still dominate mainstream feminist literature. Jeremiah is, instead, attentive to literary depictions of childhood . . . . Jeremiah's methodology is both comparative and connective . . . . [Her] narration is lucid, cogent, and conversational, beginning with a synoptic reading of the various novels, and culminating in a sustained critical engagement with their various thematic issues. . . . It is perhaps a measure of how good Jeremiah's critical work is that I found [this book] to be an excellent template for examining similar concerns in other genres, such as Modernist poetry and ?lm. -- Shalini Sengupta * CONTEMPORARY WOMEN'S WRITING *[O]ffers a critical exploration of the formation of gendered subjects by analyzing depictions of young women in a selection of . . . texts, both fiction and nonfiction. . . . [W]ill prove useful both in the German and Anglo-American context. * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Willful Girls Contemporary Anglo-American and German Feminisms Agency and Volition Body and Beauty Sisterhood and Identification Sex and Desire Conclusion: Green Girls, Trainwrecks, and Willful Politics Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisEssays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived. What is the status of women's writing in German today, in an era when feminism has thoroughly problematized binary conceptions of sex and gender? Drawing on gender and queer theory, including the work of Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which "women's literature" has been conceived. With aneye to the literary and feminist legacy of authors such as Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann, contributors treat the works of many of contemporary Germany's most significant literary voices, including Hatice Akyün, Sibylle Berg,Thea Dorn, Tanja Dückers, Karen Duve, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Katharina Hacker, Charlotte Roche, Julia Schoch, and Antje Rávic Strubel -- authors who, through their writing or their roles in the media, engage with questionsof what it means to be a woman writer in twenty-first-century Germany. Contributors: Hester Baer, Necia Chronister, Helga Druxes, Valerie Heffernan, Alexandra Merley Hill, Lindsay Lawton, Sheridan Marshall, Mihaela Petrescu, Jill Suzanne Smith, Carrie Smith-Prei, Maria Stehle, Katherine Stone. Hester Baer is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland. Alexandra Merley Hill is Associate Professor of German at the University of Portland.Trade Review[S]ucceeds in demonstrating the continued relevance of 'German women's writing,' not least its ability to critique, destabilize, and confound. . . . A welcome resource for undergraduate and graduate seminars, the volume is also of value for scholarly research on the diverse approaches and authors that constitute the field of the field of German women's writing today. -- Brigitte Rossbacher * STUDIES IN 20TH- AND 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *[A] very useful volume which takes stock of women's writing today while also exploring how women have been affected by socio-cultural, political, and economic changes. -- Linda Shortt * MONATSHEFTE *[A] volume which shows the variety of topics covered by women's German-language writing today. It succeeds in fulfilling its aim of making the case for women's writing in the age of neoliberalism and for feminist analysis that avoids what is facile or categorical. -- Stuart Parkes * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES *[E]ngaging, provocative . . . . [D]emonstrates . . . the ways in which feminist analyses open up texts to critical questions of gender within larger configurations of identity and the lasting need to consider women's literature. -- Barbara Kosta * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *The volume succeeds in making the case for the relevance of reading and researching women's writing in the twenty-first century. . . . It . . . is a fine example of careful, profound, and progressive scholarship. Editors and contributors are to be commended for this excellent work. -- Katharina Gerstenberger * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *Baer and Hill have put together an attractive collection that seeks to analyze contemporary fiction in conjunction with feminism. Using new perspectives in feminist theory, the contributors offer original interpretations and challenging insights. . . . Approaching contemporary literature in fresh, productive ways, all these essays are interesting and well researched. . . . Recommended. * CHOICE *In sum, this volume presents a valuable and highly recommended reference for anyone interested not only in contemporary women's writing, but also intersectional feminist research and the debates surrounding feminist literary criticism. -- Sonja Klocke * WOMEN IN GERMAN NEWSLETTER *Table of ContentsIntroduction: German Women's Writing Beyond the Gender Binary - Hester Baer and Alexandra Merley Hill Language-Bodies: Interpellation and Gender Transition in Antje Rávic Strubel's Kältere Schichten der Luft and Judith Hermann's "Sonja" - Necia Chronister Matrilineal Narrative and the Feminist Family Romance - Valerie Heffernan The Pitfalls of Constructing a Female Genealogy: Cultural Memory of National Socialism in Recent Family Narratives - Katherine Stone Reckoning with God: Attitudes toward Religion in German-Language Women's Writing in the Twenty-First Century - Sheridan Marshall Muslim Writing, Women's Writing - Lindsay Lawton Popfeminism, Ethnicity, and Race in Contemporary Germany: Hatice Akyün's Popfeminist Autobiographic Works Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße (2005) and Ali zum Dessert (2008) - Mihaela Petrescu The Awkward Politics of Popfeminist Literary Events: Helene Hegemann, Charlotte Roche, and Lady Bitch Ray - Carrie Smith-Prei The Awkward Politics of Popfeminist Literary Events: Helene Hegemann, Charlotte Roche, and Lady Bitch Ray - Maria Stehle The Indictment of Neoliberalism and Communism in the Novels of Katharina Hacker, Nikola Richter, Judith Schalansky, and Julia Schoch - Helga Druxes Sounds of Silence: Rape and Representation in Juli Zeh's Bosnian Travelogue - Jill Suzanne Smith Bibliography Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisNew essays by leading scholars examining today's vibrant and innovative German crime fiction, along with its historical background. Although George Bernard Shaw quipped that "the Germans lack talent for two things: revolution and crime novels," there is a long tradition of German crime fiction; it simply hasn't aligned itself with international trends. Duringthe 1920s, German-language writers dispensed with the detective and focused instead on criminals, a trend that did not take hold in other countries until after 1945, by which time Germany had gone on to produce antidetective novels that were similarly ahead of their time. German crime fiction has thus always been a curious case; rather than follow the established rules of the genre, it has always been interested in examining, breaking, and ultimately rewriting those rules. This book assembles leading international scholars to examine today's German crime fiction. It features innovative scholarly work that matches the innovativeness of the genre, taking up the Regionalkrimi;crime fiction's reimagining and transforming of traditional identities; historical crime fiction that examines Germany's and Austria's conflicted twentieth-century past; and how the newly vibrant Austrian crime fiction ties in with and differentiates itself from its German counterpart. Contributors: Angelika Baier, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Kyle Frackman, Sascha Gerhards, Heike Henderson, Susanne C. Knittel, Anita McChesney, Traci S. O'Brien,Jon Sherman, Faye Stewart, Magdalena Waligórska. Lynn M. Kutch is Professor of German at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Todd Herzog is Professor and Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.Trade ReviewOpens up both the foreign view of German-language crime literature and the cultural self-descriptions to which [that literature] gives rise. . . . [Also] contains contributions on crime literature 'by women for women,' on feminist crime literature . . . . -- Nele Hoffmann * ARBITRIUM *[C]omprehensive and interesting analysis. . . . For readers in Germany and Austria as well the essays in Tatort Germany should be of great interest [because it allows one] to learn how the German-language detective novel is perceived in the US. I recommend Tatort Germany as an enrichment of any collection of secondary literature on the genre. * CRIMEMAG *This volume offers a rich insight into contemporary German-language crime fiction and its emerging trends. . . . [T]he extensive analysis of currently untranslated texts--with quotations in English--performs an important function, too, especially as it serves to encourage more translations of German-language crime novels in future. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *The volume's focus on contemporary trends in German-language crime fiction offers a welcome corrective to [the widespread lack of knowledge of German-language crime fiction in the English-speaking world], as does its exploration of the 'peculiarly German twists' of the genre in its three sections on place, history, and identity. . . . [R]ich and diverse . . . highly recommended for researchers of genre fiction, whether working in German Studies or beyond: quotations are provided in German and English, and an extensive bibliography[y] direct[s] readers to resources in both languages. . . . -- Katharina Hall * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[C]onvincingly make[s] a case for the serious scholarly study of your favorite guilty pleasure: those prolific German crime novels that are, in their own idiosyncratic way, every bit as good as their English and Swedish counterparts. By placing twenty-first century German crime fiction into its historical, international and theoretical contexts, Kutch and Herzog-and the volume's contributors-provide a fascinating broader explanation of a current literary phenomenon. -- Rob McFarland * WOMEN IN GERMAN NEWSLETTER *That crime fiction written in German represents a 'curious case' has been established before, but a more wide-reaching case can indeed be made for contemporary German-language crime fiction, and the editors and contributors of this volume succeed in doing so quite admirably. -- Thomas Kniesche * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog Vor Ort: The Functions and Early Roots of German Regional Crime - Kyle Frackman Krimi Quo Vadis: Literary and Televised Trends in the German Crime Genre - Sascha Gerhards Plurality and Alterity in wolf Haas's Detective Brenner Mysteries - Jon Sherman The Case of the Austrian Regional Crime Novel - Anita McChesney "Darkness at the Beginning": The Holocaust in Contemporary German Crime Fiction - Magdalena Waligórska Case Histories: The Lagacy of Nazi Euthanasia in Recent German Heimatkrimis - Susanne C. Knittel "Der Fall Loest": A Case Study of Crime Stories and the Public Sphere in the GDR - Carol Anne Costabile-Heming What's in Your Bag?: "Freudian Crimes" and Austria's Nazi Past in Eva Rossmann's Freudsche Verbrechen - Traci S. O'Brien Layered Deviance: Intersexuality in Contemporary German Crime Fiction - Angelika Baier Girls in the Gay Bar: Performing and Policing Identity in Crime Fiction - Faye Stewart Eva Rossmann's Culinary Mysteries - Heike Henderson Works Cited Index

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

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Book SynopsisThis volume discusses some of Tan's key themes: communication across generations of a family when those generations have grown up in different cultures, the immigrant experience, mother/daughter relationships, the intersection of gender roles and an Asian or Asian American experience, and depression and the artist, among others.Amy Tan has called writing "an extreme privilege, but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone." It seems Amy Tan will always be most associated with her highly successful debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. Yet she has also published five other bestselling novels, two memoirs, two children's books, and has participated in adapting her writing into many other forms of media, including film, television, and opera. This volume offers insights into the full range of her creative work.

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Book SynopsisThe first comprehensive study to address Franzen's work to date, including his latest novel, Crossroads. Jonathan Franzen—novelist and essayist—is a critical darling, commercial success, and magnet for controversy. His third novel, The Corrections (2000), was selected for Oprah's book club, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the National Book Award. Franzen has been featured on the cover of Time and in an episode of The Simpsons. Love him or hate him, the publication of each new novel is a literary event. In Understanding Jonathan Franzen, Timothy Galow studies Franzen's first five novels plus his most recent, Crossroads, which was published to much fanfare in 2021. He opens with the Oprah controversy—Franzen, it seems, did not want his books to be popular—and goes on to unpack the author's ambivalent relationship to his status within the "Theory Generation" of 1980s college graduates turned writers and the postmodern threads that run throughout his work. For Franzen, the social and individual are inseparable. Galow examines why Franzen's stories of (white, bourgeois) American life have inspired and provoked readers for over two decades.

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

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

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

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