Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera-Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams
1st Edition
By Monique Vescia
June 08, 2015
This interdisciplinary study examines the interrelations between the documentary poetics of "Objectivism" in the United States during the 1930s. Focusing on three volumes published by the Objectivist Press in 1934--Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, George Oppen's Discrete Series, and William Carlos ...
Urban Revelations: Cities, Homes, and Other Ruins in American Literature, 1790-1860
1st Edition
By Donald J. McNutt
June 08, 2015
This study reexamines the ethos of national progress by analyzing how American writers import images of ruins from European aesthetics to cast the city as a site of instability and cultural impermanence. While highlighting the transatlantic currency of ruin imagery, the study demonstrates through ...
The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature
1st Edition
By Shelly Eversley
May 21, 2015
In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author ...
Dead Letters to the New World: Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism
1st Edition
By Michael McLoughlin
April 23, 2015
This book contextualises 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 ...
Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
1st Edition
By Martin T. Buinicki
April 23, 2015
This book examines how debates over copyright law in the United States during the nineteenth century, particularly over the lack of an international copyright law, intersected with the business practices and political and artistic beliefs of American authors. These debates shaped a discourse of ...
Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions
1st Edition
By Carlos Hiraldo
April 23, 2015
Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in ...
The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative
1st Edition
By William Tynes Cowa
April 23, 2015
In 19th century plantation literature, the runaway slave in the swamp was a recurring "bogey-man" whose presence challenged myths of the plantation system. By escaping to the swamps with its wild and threatening connotations, the runaway gained an invisibility that was more threatening to the ...
William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
1st Edition
By Andrea Elizabeth Donovan
April 23, 2015
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded by artist and craftsman William Morris in 1877, sought to preserve the integrity of historic buildings by preventing unnecessary repairs and additions. William Morris's intention and that of the SPAB, as outlined by the original manifesto...
Like Parchment in the Fire: Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War
1st Edition
By Prasanta Chakravarty
February 27, 2015
This book examines the literary, religious, and political aspects of the radical movements and various sects of the English Civil War. Featuring a chapter on John Milton, this book also addresses the legal problems that engaged the early modern radical reformers, the issue of radical religion as a ...
Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
1st Edition
By Katherine E. Kickel
February 27, 2015
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 ...
Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas: From Alejo Carpentier to Charles Johnson
1st Edition
By Timothy J. Cox
February 27, 2015
Unlike 19th century slave narratives, many recent novel-like texts about slavery deploy ironic narrative strategies, innovative structural features, and playful cruelty. This study analyzes the postmodern aesthetics common to seven tales of slavery from the United States, Martinique, and Guadeloupe...
Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel
1st Edition
By Jason Tougaw
February 27, 2015
Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found narrative impetus in ...