Bücher der Reihe American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

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.

Focusing on American fiction from 1850-1940, Narrating Class in American Fiction offers close readings in the context of literary and political history to detail the uneasy attention American authors gave to class in their production of social identities.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

The study follows the early evolution of the American frontier hero, from its roots in Mary Rowlandson's narration of her experiences as a prisoner during King Phillip's war through works by Unca Eliza Winkfield, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, the film-maker John Ford, and actor John Wayne.

This study of fiction produced in America in the decade following 1945 examines literature by writers such as Kerouac and Bellow. It examines how, though such fiction seemed to resolutely avoid the events and implications of World War II, it was still suffused with dread and suggestions of war in imagery and language.

Graham-Bertolini provides the first analysis of vigilante women in contemporary American fiction. She develops a dynamic model of vigilante heroines using literary and feminist theory and applies it to important texts to broaden our understanding of how law and culture infringe upon women's rights.

This book shows how a political and cultural dynamic of amnesia and truth telling shapes literary constructions of history. Gauthier focuses on the works of Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Bharati Mukherjee, and Julie Otsuka.

This book reads the whole of Bret Easton Ellis's oeuvre to date from Less Than Zero to Imperial Bedrooms and asks to what extent Ellis's novels can be read as critiquing the cultural moments of which they are a part.

This book reveals a female sexual economy in the marketplace of contemporary short fiction which locates a struggle for sexual power between mothers and daughters within a larger struggle to pursue that object of the American dream: whiteness.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). This is the first compilation of essays to bring together the most important U.S. Latino/a literary criticism of the last decade. This timely text has been long in coming as U.S. Latino/a literary criticism has grown exponentially throughout U.S universities since 1995.

Merrill's imaginary recreation of Auden in his occult verse trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) offers a powerful statement about the dynamics of poetic influence between gay male poets.

In Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body, Anderson explores how Modernist fiction narratives by Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and H.D. represent trauma, specifically addressing the conflict between speaking about and repressing traumatic memories, while also considering how authors' understandings of gender influence their depictions.

Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race challenges the critical emphasis on otherness in treatments of race in literary and cultural studies. Kim deftly argues that this treatment not only perpetuates narrow identity politics, but obscures the political and economic structures that shape issues of race in literary studies.

In contrast to most studies of literature from the Great Depression which focus on representations of poverty, labor, and radicalism, this project analyzes popular representations of middle class life.

Argues that the examination of contemporary American war narratives can lead to newfound understandings of American literature, American history, and American national purpose. To prove such a contention, the book blends literary, rhetorical, and cultural methods of analysis.

Moving beyond the critical tendencies to identify gay and lesbian subcultures as either hopelessly immersed in consumer capitalism or heroically resistant to it, Guy Davidson argues that while these subcultures are necessarily commodified, they also provide means of subversively negotiating aspects of life under capitalism.