Books in the Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory series

Considers the place of the reader in the fictional world of the novel, looking at how authors work to orient and disorient within imaginative space.

Examines the way that the modernization and incorporation of the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century both helped to foment the emerging late industrial cultural hierarchy and capitalized on that same hierarchy to increase readership and profits. This book also looks at how this affected American writers of the 1930s.

Focusing on a group of mid-Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers, this book illustrates the centrality of finance capitalism to the social imagination of the middle-class when the first mass market for the novel was consolidated.

Historicizing the demand for racial authenticity in 20th-century American literature, Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in "the real negro" transforms the question of what race an author belongs to into a question of what it takes to belong to that race.

Narratives of suspicion and mistrust have escaped the boundaries of specific sites of discourse to constitue a metanarrative that pervades American culture. Sandra Baringer investigates this phenomenon.

This book explores the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in African American writers from Charles Chesnutt to Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman.

This book investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory and cultural criticism.

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), founded by artist and craftsman William Morris in 1877, sought to preserve the integrity of historic buildings by preventing unnecessary repairs and additions. This study traces the history of SPAB from it's foundation to its activities in England and Western Europe.

Argues that trans-historical, cross-cultural dialogues also reveal the global complexity of 18th-century cultural forms. This book reconsiders eighteenth-century literature, art, and drama. It also proposes that engagements with the British eighteenth century double as inquiries into whether the modern world has progressed since the 18th century.

Examines how modern global development largely privileges Western multinational interests at the expense of local or indigenous concerns in the "developing" nations of the East. This work has relevance for cultural studies in the Middle East, Africa, globalization, postcolonialism, and women's studies.

Positing that male homoeroticism is a crucial component of any comprehensive understanding of modernism and the crisis of modern masculine identity, this text explores how homoerotic affect - instantiated in the works of Rimbaud, Crane and Eliot - contributes to queer theory, and shows what poetry has to offer critical inquiry.

A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, this study traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel.

This text explores the importance of work and its role in defining and developing the self. Carolyn R. Maibor illustrates the connection between the construction of a substantive self and the call for women to have increased access to the professions and higher education.

Challenging previous studies that claim anxiety and antagonism between transatlantic Victorian authors, Jennifer Cognard-Black uncovers a model of reciprocal influence among three of the most popular women writers of the era.

Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another.

In this book, Rudyard Alcocer offers a theory of Caribbean narrative, accounting for the complex interactions between scientific and literary discourses while expanding the horizons of narrative studies in general.

This book explores the construction of personal and poetic identity in the writing of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, James Beattie, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth.

Attempts to explore relationships between narrative and imperium in the context of Western Modernism by examining the Quest as a vexed trope in "Heart of Darkness", "Passage to India", "The Sheltering Sky" and the "Quiet American". This book takes stock of twentieth century theory regarding the Quest.

Presenting detailed readings of literary works about downclassing or 'vital contact' from the 1840s to the 1930s, this book measures these fictional representations against the broader historical evolution of American attitudes toward class cooperation.

Examines poetic address and in particular apostrophe (the address of absent or inanimate others) in the work of four post-World War II American poets, with a focus on loss, desire, figuration, audience, and subjectivity. This book offers an insight into both contemporary lyric and the lyric genre more generally.