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

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and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career, draws on archives, privately held unpublished Bukowski work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.

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.

Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.

Using the idea of 'parability,'or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramon Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with the work of Pynchon, Eco, Forche, Merrill, Weiner, Plath, Ashbery, and Eigner.

This book explores the conflicted relationship writers have with their public image, particularly when they have written about their personal lives. D'Amore analyzes the autobiographical works of Norman Mailer, John Edgar Wideman, and Dave Eggers in light of theories of authorship, autobiography, and celebrity.

This book subjects the works of Elizabeth Spencer, critically acclaimed but canonically marginalized, to a study that reveals their interaction with the southern canon as they question its boundaries and remap the long-established landscapes of southern identity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction. Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is a guide to Cormac McCarthy's canon from The Road to All the Pretty Horses, delving into the dominant themes in his work, his influences from Faulkner to Dante, and the current cultural debates his books have figured into.

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.

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

The Culture of Soft Work examines American writers' responses to human resource management and motivational techniques in the workplace through readings of postmodern novels and a diverse range of other canonical and popular texts.

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.

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).

The contributors to this volume use diverse critical techniques to identify how Carson McCullers' writing engages with and critiques modern social structures and how her work resonates with a twenty-first century audience. The collection includes chapters about McCullers' fiction, autobiographical writing, and dramatic works, and is groundbreaking because it includes the first detailed scholarly examination of new archival material donated to Columbus State University after the 2013 death of Dr. Mary Mercer, McCullers' psychiatrist and friend, including transcripts of the psychiatric sessions that took place between McCullers and Mercer in 1958. Further, the collection covers the scope of McCullers' canon of work, such as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), through lenses that are of growing interest in contemporary literary studies, including comparative transatlantic readings, queer theory, disability studies, and critical animal theory, among others.

This book reads the work of contemporary women poets against recent debates in third wave feminism and democratic theory in exploring the range of ways in which women poets have interrogated the complexities of being public in contemporary U.S culture.

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.