By Paul Fisher
July 21, 2016
This study investigates the paradoxical dynamics of American high culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining the strategies of Americans who wrote about European art in order to promote and legitimize literary careers. Contrary to the myths they themselves ...
By Cathy Moses
July 21, 2016
This study elucidates the relationship between identity formation and resistance to racial and sexual oppression in a group of contemporary American novels the author terms dissenting fictions, narratives that assert the subjectivity and historicity of marginalized peoples at precisely the moment ...
By Susanne M. Skubal
July 18, 2016
An examination of the importance of oral experience as reflected in literature, Word of Mouth extends psychoanalytic theory as forwarded by Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. The meaning of oral experience is explored with reference to several texts, looking at the oral bond ...
By Charles Lewis
May 18, 2016
This interdisciplinary study examines four major British and American novels in view of key concepts from the mainstream tradition of neoclassical economics. Studies of the novel widely address its connections to capitalism, yet literary critics and theorists rarely make reference to neoclassical ...
By Malin Pereira
May 13, 2016
This study argues that twentieth-century American women writers' textual representations of female beauty generally recognize a link between beauty standards and aesthetic ideology, exploring female beauty as a symptom of prevailing ideas about art and esthetics. Female beauty, in their texts, is ...
By Antonia Macdonald-Smythe
May 13, 2016
This study focuses on the ways in which two of the most prominent Caribbean women writers residing in the United States, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid, have made themselves at home within Caribbean poetics, even as their migration to the United States affords them participation and acceptance ...
By Ying Lee
March 21, 2013
This book examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. In it, Ying focuses on ideas of domesticity and the male body and demonstrates that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes...
By Susanna Pavloska
April 27, 2016
This book explores the ways in which the American writers Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston used modernist primitivism to assert a uniquely American literary identity in the face of European cultural hegemony.The extended Introduction traces the history of primitivism from a ...
By Kristin K Henson
March 03, 2016
Beyond the Sound Barrier examines twentieth-century fictional representations of popular music-particularly jazz-in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Kristin K. Henson argues that an analysis of musical tropes in the work of these four ...
By Robert Durante
February 29, 2016
Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, ...
By Sean C. Grass
November 27, 2015
Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny...
By Renée Dickinson
November 03, 2015
This study considers the work of two experimental British women modernists writing in the tumultuous interwar period--Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore--by examining four crucial incarnations of female embodiment and subjectivity: female bodies, geographical imagery, national ideology and textual...