Bøker i American Literature Readings in the 21st Century-serien

Campus Fictions argues that the academic novel balances utopian and regressive tendencies, reinforcing the crises we face in higher learning while simultaneously signposting hope for a worn institution. Whether a bestseller such as Erich Segal ¿s romance Love Story (1970) or wonkier fare such as Don DeLillös White Noise (1985), the academic novel mystifies the academy not only to a wide public but alsöworse¿to readers who might describe themselves as sympathetic to higher learning. The book takes an eclectic approach to the academic novel with chapters discussing, for example, the genre¿s rampant anti-intellectualism and its work refusals, studying novels such as Ishmael Reed¿s Japanese by Spring (1993) and Julie Schumacher¿s Dear Committee Members (2014). The book is also accompanied by the ¿Directory of the American Campus Novel ¿ file, which tracks the genre by year, by setting, and by other datapoints that readers might make use of. Responding directly to Jeffrey Williams, the renowned scholar of critical university studies who implores faculty to ¿teach the university,¿ the book ¿s conclusion describes strategies for putting these novels into circulation in the classroom. Through this breadth, Campus Fictions establishes the importance of maintaining hope in the field of critical university studies, which tends toward apocalypticism and perhaps therefore toward disengagement.

In this wide-ranging study, Gomma examines contemporary migrant narratives by Arab-American, Chicana, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, and Cuban-American women writers. Concepts such as national consciousness, time, space, and belonging are scrutinized through the "non-national" experience, unsettling notions of a unified America.

The Anti-Hero in the American Novel rereads major texts of the 1960s to offer an innovative re-evaluation of a set of canonical novels that moves beyond entrenched post-modern and post-structural interpretations towards an appraisal which emphasizes the specifically humanist and idealist elements of these works.

This book explores Henry James's negotiations with nineteenth-century ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and literary style through the responses of three women who have never before been substantively examined in light of their relationships to his work.

Norman Mailer s Later Fiction considers five works - Ancient Evenings (1983), Tough Guys Don t Dance (1984), Harlot's Ghost (1991), The Gospel According to the Son (1997), The Castle in the Forest (2007) - to examine, for the first time in a full volume, Mailer s literary maturity.

This study explores the concept of fetishism as a strategy for expressing social and political discontent in American literature, and for negotiating traumatic experiences particular to the second half of the twentieth century.

So muchmore than an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Wharton is reconsideredin this book as a controversial playwright, a gifted poet, a trailblazing travelwriter, an innovative and subversive critic, a hugely influential design writer, andan author who overturned the conventions of autobiographical form.

Criticism of the work of David Foster Wallace has tended to be atomistic, focusing on a single aspect of individual works. A Companion to the Work of David Foster Wa ll ace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. This volume includes both thematic essays and focused examinations of each of his major works of fiction.

This book explores the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and the ways in which experimental poets formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology, which proposes using negative statements as a means of attesting to the superior, unrepresentable being of God.

This timely volume explores the signal contribution George Saunders has made to the development of the short story form in books ranging from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Tenth of December (2013).

Writing Celebrity is divided into three major sections. The first part traces the rise of a national celebrity culture in the United States and examines the impact that this culture had on "literary" writing in the decades before World War II.

Criticism of the work of David Foster Wallace has tended to be atomistic, focusing on a single aspect of individual works. A Companion to the Work of David Foster Wa ll ace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. This volume includes both thematic essays and focused examinations of each of his major works of fiction.

Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.

Featuring essays by scholars from around the globe, Kate Chopin in Context revitalizes discussions on the famed 19th-century author of The Awakening . Expanding the horizons of Chopin's influence, contributors offer readers glimpses into the multi-national appreciation and versatility of the author's works, including within the classroom setting.

American dramas consciously rewrite the past as a means of determined criticism and intentional resistance. While modern criticism often sees the act of revision as derivative, Malburne-Wade uses Victor Turner's concept of the social drama and the concept of the liminal to argue for a more complicated view of revision.

This timely and incisive study reads contemporary literature and visual culture from the American South through the lens of cultural memory. Rooting texts in their regional locations, the book interrupts and questions the dominant trends in Southern Studies, providing a fresh and nuanced view of twenty-first-century texts.

After clarifying the hidden allegory interconnecting black slaves and black whales, this book carefully sheds the layers of a hidden meaning that will be too convincing to ignore for future readings: Moby-Dick is ultimately a novel that is intimately connected with questions of race, slavery, and the state.

Through topics like the Oprah's Book Club, Harry Potter, and Chick Lit, Cecilia Konchar Farr explores the lively, democratic, and gendered history of novels in the US as a context for understanding how avid readers and literary professionals have come to assess them so differently.

Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction. Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities.

This book explores the conflicted relationship writers have with their public image, particularly when they have written about their personal lives. D'Amore analyzes the autobiographical works of Norman Mailer, John Edgar Wideman, and Dave Eggers in light of theories of authorship, autobiography, and celebrity.

This study imagines modernism as a series of conversations and locates Edith Wharton s voice in those debates.

The Culture of Soft Work examines American writers' responses to human resource management and motivational techniques in the workplace through readings of postmodern novels and a diverse range of other canonical and popular texts.

Interdisciplinary in nature, this project draws on fiction, non-fiction and archival material to theorize urban space and literary/cultural production in the context of the United States and New York City. Spanning from the mid-1970s fiscal crisis to the 1987 Market Crash, New York writing becomes akin to geographical fieldwork in this rich study.

This critical study of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career, draws on archives, privately held unpublished Bukowski work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.

This timely volume explores the signal contribution George Saunders has made to the development of the short story form in books ranging from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Tenth of December (2013).

This book examines the artistic use of freak shows between 1900-1950. During this period, the freak show shifted from a highly popular and profitable form of entertainment to a reviled one. But why? And how does this response reflect larger social changes in the United States at the time? Fahy examines this change and how artists responded.

This book charts Fitzgerald's use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular American entertainer, and on the other to make his mark in an elite, international literary field.

This study discovers how contemporary writers have imagined possible relationships between African American and white women that overcome the stereotypical patterns of racism, using novels and autobiographies and focusing on works by William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, Audre Lorde, Kaye Gibbons, Elizabeth Cox, Sherley Anne Wiliams, and Toni Morrison

Dowdy uncovers and analyzes the primary rhetorical strategies, particularly figures of voice, in American political poetry from the Vietnam War-era to the present. He brings together a unique and diverse collection of poets, including an innovative section on hip hop performance.

This book reveals the full extent of electricity's significance in Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century literature and culture. It provides in-depth coverage of a wide range of canonical American authors from the American Renaissance onwards. As well as many fascinating hitherto under-studied writers.