Bücher der Reihe Contributions to English and American Literary Studies (CEALS)

Surveillance has infiltrated all aspects of our lives, forcing us to reconsider established notions of privacy, subjectivity, and the status of the individual. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the social, political, and cultural implications of surveillance in contemporary society.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of representations of female murderers in modern American drama. Paying close attention to each play's plot, form, and style, the study seeks to come to terms with the dramatic and cultural function of this phenomenon.

Essays explore how historically specific literary texts engage with epistemological questions in relation to material and social forms as well as representation. Literature is discussed as a culturally embedded form of knowledge production in its own right, which deploys narrative and poetic methods of exploration to establish a dissident archive.

This study models the skyscraper as a complex network of actors and retraces its initial assemblage during the 19th century to its evolution into a smart structure from the mid-20th century onwards by looking at a great number of US-American novels and movies. It connects classic spatial theories with concepts and methods of ANT and Urban Studies.

This study corrects wisdom that only men can be dandies. Revising dandyism to include women dandies offers new interpretations of Edith Sitwell, Nancy Cunard, and Mina Loy, whose poetry and photography feed into each other to produce queer authorial performances, redefining the synergy of dandyism and authorship in modernist literary culture.

This book is committed to women as writers and storytellers; all the selected novels are female-centric in that the main characters are women.¿The authors, also women, are from three diverse American ethnic groups from both the North and South. Through a close reading of several novels, Babakhani shows how the reinvention of cultural traditions serves these women writers as a political, decolonial, and feminist tool. Babakhani situates her readings in a critique of the concepts of realism and magical realism. ¿Because magical realism sets realism against magic and implies binary oppositions, Babakhani proposes "cultural realism" as a revisionary concept that takes the cultural importance of rituals and beliefs seriously, without simply dismissing them as superstition.