Books in the Modern American Literature series

Proposes readings of justice in contemporary American literature. This book examines contemporary writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. It concludes by observing that justice in contemporary American life is not about closure, but is an open-ended practice of human action, a theory that corresponds to postmodern theories of narrative.

Autobiography, Ecology, and the Well-Placed Self

Many readers imagine Gavin Stevens as character similar to William Faulkner in his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha, and while Stevens was once considered reliable Faulknerian spokesperson, ample scholarship has demonstrated that he functions as far more than the author's mouthpiece. This book defines Stevens' role and examines scope of his influence.

Offers an ecocritical reading of the "Watson Trilogy" which draws together themes Matthiessen has been exploring both in his fiction and nonfiction. In this book, the study argues that his ecological imagination comes from his experience as a novelist, naturalist, environmentalist, social activist, and a student of Zen.

The alleged affair between Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, and his slave Sally Hemings was proven as a fact by DNA analysis in 1998. This book examines how African American writers have depicted the issues of race, gender, and identity for Sally Hemings and her descendants in modern and postmodern novels.

Don DeLillo is a phenomenologist of the contemporary technoscape and an ecologist of our new kind of natural habitat. This book examines the variety of modes in which DeLillo's fictions illustrate the technologically mediated confluence of his human subjects and the field of cultural objects in which they discover themselves.