Search results for ""Author Nancy J. Peterson""
University of Pennsylvania Press Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory
In Against Amnesia, Nancy J. Peterson addresses the ongoing postmodernist debate over the possibility and relevance of documentary and official histories. Drawing on Adrienne Rich's claim that women's literature and multicultural literature vigorously resist the amnesia and nostalgia that characterize mainstream North American culture, Peterson examines the struggles toward collective memory in a wealth of contemporary women's writing. Peterson's in-depth analyses of selected works by Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Irena Klepfisz, Joy Kogawa, and other contemporary women writers illustrate the ways in which these authors recover and represent the historical memories attached to their racial/ethnic backgrounds. Their works probe traumatic moments in the marginalized histories of minority peoples, including Native American genocide and dispossession; African American slavery, migration, and displacement; the Holocaust; and the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Peterson contends that these writers employ literary strategies that call attention to the gaps and silences of official histories. At the same time, these literary strategies allow the authors to narrate resonant counterhistories. Rejecting the playfully imaginative treatment of history found in typical postmodern novels, these contemporary women writers seek to reconstruct historical narratives in their texts and thereby reinvigorate historical memory in contemporary American culture.
£64.80
Johns Hopkins University Press Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches
The 1993 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Toni Morrison is well established as one of the leading voices in American letters. Even so, her novels are often read narrowly rather than expansively, read as literary artifacts rather than as dynamic cultural texts. Without ignoring the literary and artistic achievements of Morrison's writing, Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches calls attention to the cultural and political dimensions of her work. Drawing on a diverse range of approaches and theories-from W. E. B. DuBois to deconstruction and postmodernism, from black feminist criticism to reader response-these essays investigate such timely issues as debates about canonization, about race and gender divisions in America, about the founding assumptions of African American identity. Contributors: Barbara T. Christian, Marianne DeKoven, Dwight A. McBride, Patricia McKee, Richard C. Moreland, Toni Morrison, Rafael Perez-Torres, Nancy J. Peterson, James Phelan, Eusebio L. Rodrigues, Judylyn S. Ryan, Caroline M. Woidat "These essays exemplify the kinds of issues being addressed in the nineties by scholars of Morrison and by the profession more broadly. The topics of the individual essays vary, but read together, they offer valuable insights into why Morrison has become a much celebrated, widely taught author."-from the Introduction
£25.50
