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While the connections between science fiction and race have largely been neglected by scholars, racial identity is a key element of the subjectivity constructed in American SF. In his Mars series, Edgar Rice Burroughs primarily supported essentialist constructions of racial identity, but also included a few elements of racial egalitarianism. Writing in the 1930s, George S. Schuyler revised Burroughs' normative SF triangle of white author, white audience, and white protagonist and promoted an individualistic, highly variable concept of race instead. While both Burroughs and Schuyler wrote SF focusing on racial identity, the largely separate genres of science fiction and African American literature prevented the similarities between the two authors from being adequately acknowledged and explored. Beginning in the 1960s, Samuel R. Delany more fully joined SF and African American literature. Delany expands on Schuyler's racial constructionist approach to identity, including gender and sexuality in addition to race. Critically intertwining the genres of SF and African American literature allows a critique of the racism in the science fiction and a more accurate and positive portrayal of the scientific connections in the African American literature. Connecting the popular fiction of Burroughs, the controversial career of Schuyler, and the postmodern texts of Delany illuminates a gradual change from a stable, essentialist construction of racial identity at the turn of the century to the variable, social construction of poststructuralist subjectivity today.

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Drawing together diverse literary, critical and theoretical texts in which the palimpsest has appeared since its inauguration by Thomas De Quincey in 1845, Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory provides the first ever genealogy of this metaphor. Sarah Dillon's original theorization argues that the palimpsest has an involuted structure which illuminates and advances modern thought. While demonstrating how this structure refigures concepts such as history, subjectivity, temporality, metaphor, textuality and sexuality, Dillon returns repeatedly to the question of reading. This theorization is interwoven with close readings of texts by D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan and H.D.

Clearly written, and negotiating a range of critical theories and modern literary texts, this book provides a reference point and critical tool for future employment of the concept of `palimpsestuousness', and makes a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the relationship between theoretical and critical writing on literature. ... Read more

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A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has until recently been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, this volume traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel, illustrating how divorce has reflected conflicting ideologies and notions of American identity. Focusing primarily on work by William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy, and John Updike, Love American Style offers insights regarding both the treatment of divorce in the American novel as well as its predominance in American culture. ... Read more

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During the so-called "Age of Melancholy," many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes and preventions of political disorder, on both specific and abstract levels. Thus, at one and the same moment, a writer could write about melancholy to discuss specific and ongoing political crises and to explore more generally the principles which generate political conflicts in the first place. In the course of developing a traditional discourse of melancholy of its own, English writers appropriated representations of the disease DS often ineffectively DS in order to account for the political turbulence during the civil war and Interregnum periods ... Read more

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This interdisciplinary study participates in the ongoing critical conversation about postwar American poetry and visual culture, while advancing that field into the arena of the museum. Turning to contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting, the book demonstrates the particular importance of the museum as a cultural site that is both inspiration and provocation for poets. The study uniquely bridges the "dual canon" in contemporary poetry (and calls the lyric/avant-garde distinction into question) by analyzing museum-sponsored anthologies as well as poems by John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Fraser, Cole Swensen, Anne Carson, and others. Through these case studies of poets with diverse affiliations, the author shows that the boom in ekphrasis in the past 20 years is not only an aesthetic but a critical phenomenon, a way that poets have come to terms with the critical dilemmas of our moment. Highlighting the importance of poets' "peripheral vision"DLawareness of the institutional conditions that frame encounters with artDLthe author contend that a museum visit becomes a forum for questioning oppositions that have preoccupied literary criticism for the past 50 years: homage and innovation, modernism and postmodernism, subjectivity and collectivity. The study shows that ekphrasis becomes a strategy for negotiating these impassesDLa mode of political inquiry, a meditation on canonization, a venue for comic appraisal of institutionalization, and a means of "site-specific" feminist revisionDLin a vital synthesis of critique, perspicacity, and pleasure. ... Read more

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The Civil War was the first "image war," as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historic moment. At the same time, writers used the Civil War to present both their notions of nation and their ideas about the new intersections between photography and literary form. Through the Negative offers an account of the collisions between print and visual culture in the work of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Crane, as they responded to and incorporated the work of such photographers as George Barnard, Alexander Gardner, and Jacob Riis. Megan Rowley Williams examines how key nineteenth-century American writers attempted to combat, understand, and incorporate the advent of photography in their fiction. In so doing, Williams demonstrates how analyzing the impact of photography on the diverse narrative histories of the nineteenth century yields fresh insights about contemporary art and writing-including an epilogue that applies her study to photography of the events of 9/11-as the photographic image continues to shape national consciousness. ... Read more

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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 not merely an issue of whether a female character is pretty or not;it is an expression of the controlling discourses negotiated by character, text, and author.In this study, therefore, the women writers' texts are read after interchapters outlining their key cultural and literary contexts.

Revising Paul de Man's method of exploring "scenes of reading", this study focuses on "scenes of beauty" in which a character, narrator, or speaker negotiates ideas about beauty.The author pairs Euro-American and African American women writers across the century in three "generations":H.D. and Zora Neale Hurston; Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath; and Toni Morrison and Louis Gluck.As such, this study offers a landmark black/white dialogue on female beauty in twentieth-century American culture and literature. "Scenes of beauty" in the texts of these writers suggest multiple feminine aesthetics in twentieth-century American writing, unified in their negotiation of the aesthetic ideologies embodied in female beauty. ... Read more

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This study examines the early dramatic works of Yeats, Synge, and Gregory in the context of late colonial Ireland’s unique socio-political landscape. By contextualizing each author’s work within the artistic and political discourses of their time, Cusack demonstrates the complex negotiation of nationalism, class, and gender identities undertaken by these three authors in the years leading up to Ireland’s revolution against England. Furthermore, by focusing on plays written by each author in the context of the ongoing debates over Irish national identity that were taking place throughout Irish public life in this period, Cusack examines in more depth than previous studies the ways Yeats, Gregory, and Synge adapted conventional dramatic and linguistic forms to accommodate the conflicting claims of Irish nationalism. In so doing, he demonstrates the contribution these authors made not only to the development of Irish nationalism but also to modern and postcolonial literature as we understand them today.

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Medical, popular, and literary understanding about the imagination converged when Thomas Willis asserted that he had discovered the area of the brain that facilitated imagining. Taking this 'discovery' as paradigmatic, Novel Notions examines the reverberations of the medical investigation of the imagination in early British novels by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe. It argues that one of the novel's central features was a mapping of the terrain of human cognition, imagination, and creation, as a continuation of early modern medicine's account of perceptual experience. All the novels discussed reveal a simultaneous anxiety and excitement about medicine's understanding of the relationship between the imagination and perceptual experience through narrators who reflect on the nature of authoring.

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The story of the American self-made man carries a perennial interest in American literature and cultural studies. This book expands the study of such stories to include the writings of Frederick Douglass, Horatio Alger, and James Weldon Johnson, and the work of silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. Tom 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 labor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fascinating and Well-Research
Interesting mix of academic research and cultural observation.Pulls together disparate media - personal narratives, silent film, novels - to explore the imbedded economic and social implications of the (particularly American) mythology of the self-made man.In particular I love the stuff about the silent film guys.Not an easy read, but a rewarding one nonetheless.You'll want to go (re)read and (re)watch all of the texts and films discussed here. ... Read more

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The Regen(d)eration of the British Modern Novel is a study of the ways in which the cultural forces and discourses of gender inflect the practice and theory of three modernist British novelists, E.M. Forster, May Sinclair and D. H. Lawrence. Building on previously explored interconnections between gender, theory and formal innovations in Virginia Woolf's novel writing, especially in Orlando , the author goes on to explore Forster's 'queered' use of fantasy, Sinclair's representation of 'manly genius' in both male and female streams of consciousness, and Lawrence's quest for the novel of 'phallic consciousness' as three diverse examples of how literary modernism wrestled with the 'gender crisis' of the early twentieth-century. The books primary focus is a reading of each author's central novels in dialogue with his/her theoretical writings on the novel (as well as key critical voices) and the ways in which gender categories and attitudes are linked to formal structures in his/her work, with seemingly contradictory results between theory and practice in each case. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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Drawing on critical and theoretical work by Miller, Boone, Foucault, Jameson, and others, as well as cultural history, affect theory, and contemporary psychiatric literature, the author defines and explores what he calls the Victorian conspiracy narrative tradition--a tradition which embraces classic Victorian works like Bleak House, Great Expectations, Villette, and The Moonstone, as well as later Victorian and Edwardian novels by James, Conrad, and Chesterton, and early spy thrillers such as The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps. In reading these works as instances of a single literary tradition, the conspiracy narrative tradition, the author traces how the representation of conspiracy changes in nineteenth-century British literature and argues that many of these changes occur in response to significant Victorian-era developments, such as the European revolutions of 1848-49, the rise of British law enforcement agencies, the growth of Irish Fenian terrorism, and the fin-de-siècle waning of the British Empire. The book also explores the roles that conspiratorial indeterminacy and irony play in shaping the Victorian conspiracy narrative tradition and examines how modern works by Proust, Kafka, and Pynchon appropriate elements from Victorian conspiracy narratives. Finally, in using recent work on affect theory as well as studies of paranoia by Freud, Shapiro, and Meissner, the book traces how Victorian works fashion the paranoid subject, a discursive process that ultimately leads to the emergence of the modern fictional conspiracy theorist.

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Sondra Archimedes' enthralling and detailed study presents new ways of thinking about the female body and Victorian society. Discussing novels by Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard and Thomas Hardy, it examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. Considering Foucault's notion of perverse sexualities and Herbert Spencer's model of the social organism, she argues that the pathologized female body displaces or resolves -- on a narrative level -- larger cultural anxieties concerning the health of the British race.Exploring female sexual deviance in the Victorian novel as a marker of social decay, the book pays particular attention to issues of sibling incest, racial stereotyping and neurasthenia, shedding light on the way in which biological thinking permeated British culture in the second half of the century."Gendered Pathologies" employs Spencer's model of the 'social body' to analyze the connections between Victorian society and gendered science.Using the model in this way not only highlights larger social anxieties about the longevity of the British species, but also issues relating to reproduction. These ideas form a conceptual framework for the entire book. ... Read more

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Employing a genealogy of social/literary inscription the author traces the frantic writing of the body of the poor woman to her representations in the writings of John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Betty Smith, Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, Grace Lumpkin, Harriet Arnow, and Zora Neale Hurston and to the photography of Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lange.In connecting these foundational templates to the contemporary production of the "poor American woman," the author demonstrates the power of these early texts to inform our understanding of the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor woman today. ... Read more

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This book analyzes the work of Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston alongside biographical materials and discourses on the body. Thomas McGlamery views each of these authors' literary output as an effort to "work through" the political meanings associated with the body, examining how they negotiate identities of class, gender, race, sexuality, and age. ... Read more

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This book contextualizes and details Herman Melville's artistic career and outlines the relationship between Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Michael McLoughlin divides Melville's professional career as a novelist into two major phases corresponding to the growth and shift in his art. In the developmental phase, from 1845 to 1850, Melville wrote his five Transcendental novels of the sea, in which he defended self-reliance, attacked conformity, and learned to employ Transcendental symbols of increasing complexity. This phase culminates inMoby-Dick, with its remarkable matching of Transcendental idealism with tragic drama, influenced by Hawthorne. After 1851, Melville endeavored to find new ways to express himself and to re-envision human experience philosophically. In this period of transition, Melville wrote anti-Transcendental fiction attacking self-reliance as well as conformity and substituting fatalism for Emersonian optimism. According to McLoughlin, Moby-Dick represents an important transitional moment in Herman Melville's art, dramatically altering tendencies inherent in the novels from Typee onward; in contrast to Melville's blithely exciting and largely optimistic first six novels of the sea, Melville's later works-beginning with his pivotal epic Moby-Dick-assume a much darker and increasingly anti-Transcendental philosophical position. ... Read more

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Overheard Voices 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. By approaching these crucial issues from an unexpected angle--through a study of the seldom-examined lyric "you"--Overheard Voices offers new insight into both contemporary lyric and the lyric genre more generally. The book offers detailed readings of Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Louise Gluck, and Frank Bidart. ... Read more