Books in the American Literature Readings in the 21st Century series

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.

This book builds upon recent theoretical approaches that define queerness as more of a temporal orientation than a sexual one to explore how Edgar Allan Poe's literary works were frequently invested in imagining lives that contemporary readers can understand as queer, as they stray outside of or aggressively reject normative life paths, including heterosexual romance, marriage, and reproduction, and emphasize individuals' present desires over future plans. The book's analysis of many of Poe's best-known works, including "e;The Raven,"e; "e;The Fall of the House of Usher,"e; "e;The Black Cat,"e; "e;The Masque of the Red Death,"e; and "e;The Murders in the Rue Morgue,"e; show that his attraction to the liberation of queerness is accompanied by demonstrations of extreme anxiety about the potentially terrifying consequences of non-normative choices. While Poe never resolved the conflicts in his thinking, this book argues that this compelling imaginative tension between queerness and temporal normativity is crucial to understanding his canon.

This volume presents a collection of critical essays that center women's friendship in women's literary and artistic production.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of antebellum American literature and the problem of political emergency.

This book translates recent scholarship into pedagogy for teaching Edith Wharton¿s widely celebrated and less-known fiction to students in the twenty-first century. It comprises such themes as American and European cultures, material culture, identity, sexuality, class, gender, law, history, journalism, anarchism, war, addiction, disability, ecology, technology, and social media in historical, cultural, transcultural, international, and regional contexts. It includes Wharton¿s works compared to those of other authors, taught online, read in foreign universities, and studied in film adaptations.

Henry as well as lesser-known, obscure, and anonymous authors, Dangerous Giving explores ambivalent relations between dangerous gifts, modern ideology of disinterested giving, and sentimental tradition.

This book explores how confessional poets in the 1950s and 1960s US responded to a Cold War political climate that used the threat of nuclear disaster and communist infiltration as affective tools for the management of public life.

Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t analyzes post-1960 scatological novels that utilize representations of human waste to address pressing issues, including pollution of waterways, environmental racism, and militarism.

This book examines the queer implications of memory and nationhood in transcultural U.S. literature and culture. Clark creates a queer archive of transcultural U.S. texts as a way of destabilizing heteronormativity and thinking about productive spaces of queer world-building.

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas brings together both established Miller experts and emerging commentators to investigate the sources of his ongoing resonance with audiences and his place in world theatre.

By combining just-war ethics and sustained explorations of major works of twentieth and twenty-first century American war writing, this study offers the first book-length reflection on how JWT and literary studies can inform one another fruitfully.

This book translates recent scholarship into pedagogy for teaching Edith Wharton's widely celebrated and less-known fiction to students in the twenty-first century.

Building on a body of wound-theory scholarship, the book seeks to reconcile the tensions between opposing Hemingway camps, while moving beyond these rivalries into a broader analysis of the relationship between trauma, identity formation and art in Hemingway.

Re-reading major African American literary texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon.

The authors discussed in this book, including James Fenimore Cooper, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Leslie Marmon Silko, place this cross-cultural contact in nature, not only collapsing cultural and racial boundaries, but also complicating divisions between 'wilderness' and 'civilization.'

Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery stand out among major American poets - all three shaped the direction and pushed the boundaries of contemporary poetry on an international scale.

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.

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas brings together both established Miller experts and emerging commentators to investigate the sources of his ongoing resonance with audiences and his place in world theatre.

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.

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.

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.

This book analyzes a collection of literary memoirs to demonstrate how this genre is an avenue for participation in public life. Memoirs contribute to democratic society by offering solutions, creating new knowledge, revealing social trends, bringing issues to light, creating empathy and connection, and changing public opinion.

Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, literary theory, cultural studies, continental philosophy, and theology, the appeal of Cormac McCarthy's Philosophy is widespread and deeply interdisciplinary.

This book explores the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and the ways in which experimental poets formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology, which proposes using negative statements as a means of attesting to the superior, unrepresentable being of God.

This book offers a bold critical method for reading Gertrude Stein's work on its own terms by forgoing conventional explanation and adopting Stein's radical approach to meaning and knowledge.