James Baldwin by
The recognition and study of African American (AA) artists and public intellectuals often include Martin Luther King, Jr., and occasionally Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Malcolm X. The literary canon also adds Ralph Ellison, Richard White, Langston Hughes, and others such as female writers Zora Neale Hurston, MayaAngelou, and Alice Walker. Yet, the acknowledgement of AA artists and public intellectuals tends to skew the voices and works of those included toward normalized portrayals that fit well within foundational aspects of the American myths reflected in and perpetuated by traditional schooling. Further, while many AA artists and public intellectuals are distorted by mainstream media, public and political characterizations, and the curriculum, several powerful AA voices are simply omitted, ignored, including James Baldwin. This edited volume gathers a collection of essays from a wide range of perspectives that confront Baldwin's impressive and challenging canon as well as his role as a public intellectual. Contributors also explore Baldwin as a confrontational voice during his life and as an enduring call for justice.
James Baldwin by
"This fine collection of essays represents an important contribution to the rediscovery of Baldwin's stature as essayist, novelist, black prophetic political voice, and witness to the Civil Rights era. The title provides an excellent thematic focus. He understood both the necessity, and the impossibility, of being a black 'American' writer. He took these issues 'Beyond'---Paris, Istanbul, various parts of Africa---but this formative experience only returned him to the unresolved dilemmas. He was a fine novelist and a major prophetic political voice. He produced some of the most important essays of the twentieth century and addressed in depth the complexities of the black political movement. His relative invisibility almost lost us one of the most significant voices of his generation. This welcome 'revival' retrieves it. Close call." ---Stuart Hall, Professor Emeritus, Open University This interdisciplinary collection by leading writers in their fields brings together a discussion of the many facets of James Baldwin, both as a writer and as the prophetic conscience of a nation. The core of the volume addresses the shifting, complex relations between Baldwin as an American--"as American as any Texas GI" as he once wryly put it--and his life as an itinerant cosmopolitan. His ambivalent imaginings of America were always mediated by his conception of a world "beyond" America: a world he knew both from his travels and from his voracious reading. He was a man whose instincts were, at every turn, nurtured by America; but who at the same time developed a ferocious critique of American exceptionalism. In seeking to understand how, as an American, he could learn to live with difference--breaking the power of fundamentalisms of all stripes--he opened an urgent, timely debate that is still ours. His America was an idea fired by desire and grief in equal measure. As the authors assembled here argue, to read him now allows us to imagine new possibilities for the future. With contributions by Kevin Birmingham, Douglas Field, Kevin Gaines, Briallen Hopper, Quentin Miller, Vaughn Rasberry, Robert Reid-Pharr, George Shulman, Hortense Spillers, Colm Tóibín, Eleanor W. Traylor, Cheryl A. Wall, and Magdalena Zaborowska.
James Baldwin by
This study provides an engaging overview and clear analysis of the fiction, non-fiction and drama of African-American writer James Baldwin ( 1924-1987). Whilst giving close attention to Baldwin's popular works such as Go Tell it on the Mountain and Another Country; it also explores theimportant but less well known themes and texts including the use of the blues, masculinity, race and sexuality.
Understanding James Baldwin by
The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most--as a black man, as a gay man, as an American--were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds. In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley shows that a proper grasp of Baldwin's work begins with a grasp of the times in which he wrote. During a career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, Baldwin stood at the heart of intellectual and political debate, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues. In surveying the writer's life, Dudley traces the shift in Baldwin's aspirations from occupying the pulpit like his stepfather to becoming a writer amid the turmoil of sexual self-discovery and the harsh realities of American racism and homophobia. The book's analyses of key works in the Baldwin canon--among them, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, "Sonny's Blues," Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Devil Finds Work--demonstrate the consistency, contrary to some critics' claims, of Baldwin's vision and thematic concerns. As police violence against people of color, a resurgence in white supremacist rhetoric, and pushback against LGBTQ rights fill today's headlines, James Baldwin's powerful and often-angry words find a new resonance. From early on, Baldwin decried the damning potential of alienation and the persistent bigotry that feeds it. Yet, even as it sometimes wavered, his hope for both the individual and the nation remained intact. In the present historical moment, James Baldwin matters more than ever.
Beyond Words by
This is a book about reading, or rather about the moment when the usual frames of interpretation no longer apply. That is where the Othering Excursion begins. Through disruptive forms of rhetoric, writers discard the structures and norms of the cultural system and use the disorders thus created to suggest what lies beyond it. Cultivating distortion, conceptual blocks and chaotic constructions, their texts flout normal processes of interpretation. Whereas traditional approaches often overlook these disorders or treat them as a form of informational noise, in this study they become the basis of critical reflection. Harding and Martin elaborate a critical concept and a range of reading methods to deal with what seem to be zones of obscurity in literary texts. Cutting across boundaries of race, ethnicity and gender, they treat a wide range of poetry and short fiction that challenges traditional interpretations. Giving new readings of canonical texts, the book examines works by American authors that are widely read and taught, like Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, or Sandra Cisneros. At the same time, it includes studies of emerging writers like Kate Braverman, Dan Chaon, or Chase Twichell. There is something deeply moving in witnessing the birth of a new concept. And indeed Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin''s concept of Othering is a welcome addition to an already crowded field, where concepts like difference, alterity or hybridity are firmly established. But the new concept is more than an addition, it is more in the nature of a substitution, as it aims to replace the now exhausted concepts, allows the authors to avoid the trivialities of a criticism based on gender and race, and, by focusing on form and language (or style), to recapture the now largely lost intuitions of close reading. This combination of close reading and a firm grasp of theory is one of the attractions of the book. I am impressed by their mastery of the intricacies of theory and the range of their literary corpus (in terms both of genres and texts). I have no doubt that their book will be a major contribution to the renewal of the study of contemporary American literature. -Professor Jean-Jacques Lecercle, University of Nanterre, Paris In Beyond Words, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin offer a new attitude to reading that approaches true diversity by ignoring trends toward traditional groupings of authors by race and gender and instead examining, democratically, recent American literature in terms of its unique and peculiar achievements. In choosing texts that employ the rhetoric of the inexpressible, the authors have identified Othering as the common thread running through short fiction and poetry by authors as varied as Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros, Adrienne Rich, and Li-Young Lee. In transliterating the language of the ineffable and unspoken, Beyond Words employs its superbly original methodology toward unfolding previously inaccessible layers of meaning and provoking a fuller understanding of the creative process and its cultural milieu. -Michael Waters, Professor of English at Salisbury University, USA A germinal study from an other (in this case, European) perspective of an at once idiosyncratic and indicative range of American texts with a view of how they, themselves, encounter the unexamined and unexpected. -Marilyn Hacker, Professor at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center Invigorating and original, Beyond Words: The Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature challenges conventional ways of approaching literary texts. Eschewing binaries, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin propose a new approach to reading and analyzing the heterogeneity of recent American literature. By juxtaposing both well-known and less-familiar poetry and short fiction by authors as various as Gayl Jones, John Ashbery, Russell Banks, and Marilyn Nelson, Harding and Martin consider a stimulating variety of texts that cross aesthetic, generic, canonical and political boundaries. Harding and Martin''s polysemous approach to literary texts, a procedure they call othering, is groundbreaking and enlightening. Beyond Words provides rich insights for scholars and general readers alike. Harding and Martin''s new mapping of American literature is a remarkable achievement, certain to provoke dialogue for decades to come. -Sue Standing, Jane Ruby Professor of English, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts In this new book with the apt title Beyond Words: the Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin promise to generate intense conversation about their conceptual approach to reading canonical, as well as newer texts in late twentieth century American literature. Beyond Words favors a shift in thinking about all texts that defy conventional analysis, and it resists the cleavages that it finds in unsatisfactory terms like alterity and hybridity conceived to account for differences in gender-racial, ethnic, and class contexts. Re-conceiving Othering as a corroborative and complementary methodology rather than a splintered one, Beyond Words invites an illuminating, comprehensive analysis of literary production in late twentieth century American texts. -Helena Woodard, Associate Professor of English, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Ends of Assimilation by
Ends of Assimilation examines how Chicano literature imagines the conditions and costs of cultural change, arguing that its thematic preoccupation with assimilation illuminates the function of literature. John Alba Cutler shows how mid-century sociologists advanced a model of assimilation thatignored the interlinking of race, gender, and sexuality and characterized American culture as homogeneous, stable, and exceptional. He demonstrates how Chicano literary works from the postwar period to the present understand culture as dynamic and self-consciously promote literature as a medium forinfluencing the direction of cultural change.With original analyses of works by canonical and noncanonical writers - from Americo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca to Estela Portillo Trambley, Alfredo Vea, and Patricia Santana - Ends of Assimilation demands that we reevaluate assimilation, literature, and the very language weuse to talk about culture.
Extreme Domesticity by
Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.
Troubling Nationhood in U. S. Latina Literature by
This book examines the ways in which recent U.S. Latina literature challenges popular definitions of nationhood and national identity. It explores a group of feminist texts that are representative of the U.S. Latina literary boom of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, when an emerging group of writers gained prominence in mainstream and academic circles. Through close readings of select contemporary Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American works, Maya Socolovsky argues that these narratives are "remapping" the United States so that it is fully integrated within a larger, hemispheric Americas. Looking at such concerns as nation, place, trauma, and storytelling, writers Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago, Ana Castillo, Himilce Novas, and Judith Ortiz Cofer challenge popular views of Latino cultural "unbelonging" and make strong cases for the legitimate presence of Latinas/os within the United States. In this way, they also counter much of today's anti-immigration rhetoric. Imagining the U.S. as part of a broader "Americas," these writings trouble imperialist notions of nationhood, in which political borders and a long history of intervention and colonization beyond those borders have come to shape and determine the dominant culture's writing and the defining of all Latinos as "other" to the nation.
William Faulkner by
In William Faulkner, Richard Godden traces how the novelist's late fiction echoes the economic and racial traumas of the South's delayed modernization in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal rapidly accelerated the long-term shift from tenant farming to modern agriculture, many African Americans were driven from the land and forced to migrate north. At the same time, white landowners exchanged dependency on black labor for dependency on northern capital. Combining powerful close readings of The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable with an examination of southern economic history from the 1930s to the 1950s, Godden shows how the novels' literary complexities--from their narrative structures down to their smallest verbal emphases--reflect and refract the period's economic complexities. By demonstrating the interrelation of literary forms and economic systems, the book describes, in effect, the poetics of an economy. Original in the way it brings together close reading and historical context, William Faulkner offers innovative interpretations of late Faulkner and makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the relation between literature and history.
William Faulkner by
From the beginning, William Faulkner's art was consciously self-presenting. In writing of all kinds he created and performed a complex set of roles based in his life as he both lived and imagined it. In his fiction, he counterpoised those personae against one another to create a written world of controlled chaos, made in his own protean image and reflective of his own multiple sense of self. In this text, Watson draws on the entire Faulkner canon, including letters and photographs, to decipher the ways in which Faulkner put himself forward through written performances and displays based in, and expressive of, his biography.
William Faulkner by
-- User's guide -- A comprehensive biography of the novelist -- Detailed plot summaries of each novel -- Extracts from important critical essays that examine important aspects of each work -- A complete bibliography of the writer's novels -- A list of critical works about the author and his or her novels -- An index of themes and ideas covered in the books
William Faulkner by
A comprehensive collection of contemporary published reactions to the writing of William Faulkner from 1926 to 1962, these articles document the response of reviewers to specific works, and chronicle the development of Faulkner's reputation among the nation's book reviewers. It has often been assumed that a poor reception in the popular review publications contributed to Faulkner's lack of commercial success. The material presented here tends to refute that assumption, clarifying the development of Faulkner's literary career and providing a fuller understanding of the part played by book reviewing in the sales, promotion and success of American literature.
William Faulkner by
-- User's guide -- Biography of the short story writer -- List of characters in each story -- Detailed thematic analysis of each short story -- Extracts from major critical essays that discuss important aspects of each work -- A complete bibliography of the writer's works -- A list of critical works about the short stories covered in the book -- An index of themes and ideas in the author's work
Hawthorne Nathaniel Chs by
This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
Nathaniel Hawthorne by
The lonely art of Nathaniel Hawthorne remains one of the cultural monuments of our nation. Examine his The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun.
The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne by
As the author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has been established as a major writer of the nineteenth century and the most prominent chronicler of New England and its colonial history. This introductory book for students coming to Hawthorne for the first time outlines his life and writings in a clear and accessible style. Leland S. Person also explains some of the significant cultural and social movements that influenced Hawthorne's most important writings: Puritanism, Transcendentalism and Feminism. The major works, including The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, as well as Hawthorne's important short stories and non-fiction, are analysed in detail. The book also includes a brief history and survey of Hawthorne scholarship, with special emphasis on recent studies. Students of nineteenth-century American literature will find this a rewarding and engaging introduction to this remarkable writer.
The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston by
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a key text in African American literature. Its author Zora Neale Hurston has become an iconic figure for her literary works and for her invaluable contribution to documenting elements of black folk culture in the rural south and in the Caribbean. This introductory book designed for students explores Hurston's artistic achievements and her unique character: her staunch individualism, her penchant for drama, her sometimes controversial politics, her philosophical influences and her views on gender relations. Lovalerie King explores Hurston's life and analyses her major works and short stories. Historical, social, political, and cultural contexts for Hurston's life and work, including her key role in the development of the Harlem Renaissance, are set out. The book concludes with an overview of the reception of Hurston's work, both in her lifetime and up to the present, as well as suggestions for further reading.
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by
Zora Neale Hurston is a controversial figure, equally praised and criticized for her representation of African-Americans; while some critics emphasize her ebullience and celebration of Black culture, others call her fiction stereotypical and essentialist. Observing the workings of the recurrent humor in her works helps explode this critical binary opposition. Specifically, the carnivalesque and the heteroglossia often subvert essentialist notions of (Black) identity. Jonah's Gourd Vine's protagonist, the preacher-womanizer John Pearson, can be seen as an African rather than an African-American trickster figure, i.e. as a mobile character whose liminality helps him fight essentialist definitions imposed on him by both the white establishment and his own community. Janie's romantic search for self-fulfillment in Their Eyes Were Watching God is undermined by the humor and the carnival, which emphasize her shifting and multiply defined identity. Finally, the African-Americanized story of Moses and the Hebrews shows the conflicts involved in their search for a unified national and cultural identity. In these three novels, Hurston appears as a subversive presence whose manipulation of humor underscores a complex political vision.
The Literary Quest for an American National Character by
"What then is the American, this new man?"nbsp;This question isnbsp;explored here through the lives and writings of a sequence of imaginative authors each of whom confronted a crucial moment in the evolution of the new nation (from Crevecoeur and the Revolution, through Washington Irving and Jeffersonian Democracy, to James Fenimore Cooper and the Era of Good Feelings). At the centre of these confrontations was a division between those who claimed national perfection had been obtained, and those who, while desperately wanting to believe this, perceived all too clearly that that perfection had not yet come. Rediscovering this neglected literary debate, The Literary Quest for an American National Character illuminates afresh the traumatic birth and development of the new American nation.
D.H. Lawrence : New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation by 
D. H. Lawrence by
So many questions surround the key figures in the English literary canon, but most books focus on one aspect of an author's life or work, or limit themselves to a single critical approach. D. H. Lawrence is a comprehensive, user-friendly guide which: * offers basic information on Lawrence's, contexts and works * outlines the major critical issues surrounding his works, from the time they were written to the present * explain the full range of often very different critical views and interpretation * offer guides to further reading in each area discussed. This guidebook has a broad focus but one very clear aim: to equip you with all the knowledge you need to make your own new readings of the work of D. H. Lawrence.
D. H. Lawrence by 
Tim O'Brien by
This collection brings together a selection of recent representative critical essays on O'Brien from a variety of perspectives. After opening with several short introductory essays, the volume moves on to consider O'Brien's semi-autobiographical coverage of his experience in Vietnam and discusses O'Brien's most famous work, The Things They Carried, in addition to several of his other works.
Vietnam and Beyond by
This is a comprehensive, in-depth study of one of the most thought-provoking writers of the Vietnam war generation. This volume breaks away from previous readings of O'Brien's development as a trauma artist and an outspoken chronicler of the American involvement in Vietnam: its thematic,rather than chronological, approach contextualizes O'Brien's work beyond the confines of war literature. The necessary exploration of O'Brien's recurrent engagement with the conflict in Vietnam leads to a thorough discussion of the writer's revision of key American (and western) ideas and concerns:the association between courage, heroism and masculinity, the celebration of the pioneering spirit in the frontier narrative, the sense of superiority in the encounter with foreign civilizations, the fraught relationship between power and truth, or reality and imagination, and the attempt and theright to speak about unspeakable events.All these themes, as Ciocia illustrates, highlight O'Brien's compelling preoccupation with the role and the ethical responsibility of the storyteller. With his clear privileging of "story-truth' over "happening-truth", O'Brien makes a bold, serious investment in the power of fiction, as testified byhis formal experimentations, metanarrative reflections and sustained meditations on matters such as individual agency, moral accountability and authenticity. Approached from this fresh perspective, O'Brien emerges as a figure deserving to find a wider audience and demanding renewed scholarlyattention for his remarkable achievements as a contemporary mythographer, an acute observer of the human condition and a sharp critic of American culture.
Soldiers Once and Still by
Looks back through the twentieth century in order to confront issues of self and community in veterans' literature, exploring how war and the military have shaped the identities of Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien, three of the twentieth century's most respected authors.
A Trauma Artist by
A Trauma Artist examines how O'Brien's works variously rewrite his own traumatization during the war in Vietnam as a never-ending fiction that paradoxically recovers personal experience by both recapturing and (re)disguising it. Mark Heberle considers O'Brien's career as a writer through the prisms of post-traumatic stress disorder, postmodernist metafiction, and post-World War II American political uncertainties and public violence.
Edgar Allan Poe by
Most frequently regarded as a writer of the supernatural, Poe was actually among the most versatile of American authors, writing social satire, comic hoaxes, mystery stories, science fiction, prose poems, literary criticism and theory, and even a play. As a journalist and editor, Poe was closely in touch with the social, political, and cultural trends of nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has linked Poe's imaginative writings to the historical realities of nineteenth-century America, including to science and technology, wars and politics, the cult of death and bereavement, and, most controversially, to slavery and stereotyped attitudes toward women. Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism presents a systematic approach to topical criticism of Poe, revealing a new portrait of Poe as an author who blended topics of intellectual and social importance and returned repeatedly to these ideas in different works and using different aesthetic strategies during his brief but highly productive career. Twelve essays point readers toward new ways of considering Poe's themes, techniques, and aesthetic preoccupations by looking at Poe in the context of landscapes, domestic interiors, slavery, prosody, Eastern cultures, optical sciences, Gothicism, and literary competitions, clubs, and reviewing.
Edgar Allan Poe by
Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health or illness of his narrators. Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and Marginalia. This incisive catalogue of literary and rhetorical terms, presented in alphabetical order and amply illustrated with examples - in addition to close examinations of some of Poe's most important tales - overwhelmingly demonstrates Poe's rhetorical and linguistic dexterity putting a nearly two-hundred-year-old critical debate to rest by showing Poe to be a conscientious craftsman of the highest order.
Edgar Allan Poe by
This guide provides an introduction to a critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe''s poems. It features a few poems, offering a variety of viewpoints by different critics on the important aspects of each work and an analysis of the texts.'
Edgar Allan Poe by
Each book in the Bloom''s Major Short Story Writers series covers four to six short stories, offering a variety of viewpoints by different critics on the important aspects of each work. These guides introduce critical analysis to students of literature.'
Critical Insights - American Short Story by 
