Bøker i Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory-serien

This book investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory and cultural criticism.

This book explores the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in African American writers from Charles Chesnutt to Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman.

American literary realism burgeoned during a period of tremendous technological innovation. This work looks at how the realists tried to forge an ethical position between the two poles of science and sentimentality, attempting to create an alternative mode of speech that, avoiding the trap of codifying iteration, could enable ethical action.

Examines poetic address and in particular apostrophe (the address of absent or inanimate others) in the work of four post-World War II American poets, with a focus on loss, desire, figuration, audience, and subjectivity. This book offers an insight into both contemporary lyric and the lyric genre more generally.

Presenting detailed readings of literary works about downclassing or 'vital contact' from the 1840s to the 1930s, this book measures these fictional representations against the broader historical evolution of American attitudes toward class cooperation.

Attempts to explore relationships between narrative and imperium in the context of Western Modernism by examining the Quest as a vexed trope in "Heart of Darkness", "Passage to India", "The Sheltering Sky" and the "Quiet American". This book takes stock of twentieth century theory regarding the Quest.

In this book, Rudyard Alcocer offers a theory of Caribbean narrative, accounting for the complex interactions between scientific and literary discourses while expanding the horizons of narrative studies in general.

This book explores the construction of personal and poetic identity in the writing of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, James Beattie, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth.

Using critical race theory and literary analysis, this book charts the tense, frustrated religious language that saturates much twentieth-century American literature.

Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another.

This book analyses the work of Herman Melville, John Dos Passos and Zora Neale Hurston alongside biographical materials and discourses on the body.

Narratives of suspicion and mistrust have escaped the boundaries of specific sites of discourse to constitue a metanarrative that pervades American culture. Sandra Baringer investigates this phenomenon.

Challenging previous studies that claim anxiety and antagonism between transatlantic Victorian authors, Jennifer Cognard-Black uncovers a model of reciprocal influence among three of the most popular women writers of the era.

The story of the American self-made man carries a perennial interest in American literature and cultural studies. Thomas Nissley examines a number of texts, from Reconstruction-era autobiographies to the films of the 30s, to show the sustained market value of status and personal authenticity in the era of contract and free labour.

This text explores the importance of work and its role in defining and developing the self. Carolyn R. Maibor illustrates the connection between the construction of a substantive self and the call for women to have increased access to the professions and higher education.

A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, this study traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel.

Positing that male homoeroticism is a crucial component of any comprehensive understanding of modernism and the crisis of modern masculine identity, this text explores how homoerotic affect - instantiated in the works of Rimbaud, Crane and Eliot - contributes to queer theory, and shows what poetry has to offer critical inquiry.

Examines how modern global development largely privileges Western multinational interests at the expense of local or indigenous concerns in the "developing" nations of the East. This work has relevance for cultural studies in the Middle East, Africa, globalization, postcolonialism, and women's studies.

Argues that trans-historical, cross-cultural dialogues also reveal the global complexity of 18th-century cultural forms. This book reconsiders eighteenth-century literature, art, and drama. It also proposes that engagements with the British eighteenth century double as inquiries into whether the modern world has progressed since the 18th century.

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), founded by artist and craftsman William Morris in 1877, sought to preserve the integrity of historic buildings by preventing unnecessary repairs and additions. This study traces the history of SPAB from it's foundation to its activities in England and Western Europe.

Examines the way that the modernization and incorporation of the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century both helped to foment the emerging late industrial cultural hierarchy and capitalized on that same hierarchy to increase readership and profits. This book also looks at how this affected American writers of the 1930s.

Proposing a different direction within trauma studies, one that views the body as a medium of self-expression and, crucially, textual working through, this book traces the indissoluble bond between voice and body, trauma and corporeality. It proposes a direction within trauma studies, which views the body as a medium of self-expression.

Investigates into the problem of how narrative encodes its relation to space, especially the territorial space that is the subject of colonial possession and dispossession. This book approaches the problem by providing a framework derived from the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas on the ethical implications of human dwelling.

Explores how English masculinity - that was so contingent on the relative health of the British imperial project - negotiated the dissolution of the empire by the middle of the 20th century. This book argues that by defining itself in relation to indigenous masculinity, English masculinity began to share a common idiom with its colonial other.

Follows the aesthetic of the sublime from Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and Shelley, into Thackeray, Dickens, and Hardy. This book demonstrates that this aesthetic is an inheritance the Victorians receive from their romantic predecessors, and also a historical phenomenon that questions the artificial boundaries between romantic and Victorian.

By examining the fiction of three women modernists - Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen - this book complicates binary paradigms of national, gender and ethnic identities in the interwar period.