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English
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"Head Off the Books in this collection of newspaper columns, where J. Peder Zane uses classic and contemporary literature to explore American culture and politics. The book review editor for the Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer from 1996 to 2009, Zane demonstrates that good books are essential for understanding ourselves and the world around us. The one hundred and thirty columns gathered in Off the Books find that sweet spot where literature's...
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"Much like Greek and Roman mythology, Norse myths are read, reread, and treasured. Famous storytellers such as JRR Tolkien and Neil Gaiman have drawn their inspiration from the long-haired, mead-drinking, marauding and pillaging Vikings. The author who gave us Nordic mythology is a twelfth-century Icelandic chieftain by the name of Snorri Sturluson. Like Homer, Snorri was a bard, writing down and embellishing the folklore and pagan legends of medieval...
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"Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today--how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life--and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. But forms don't impose their order in...
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The idea of "the great American novel" continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying more than 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity...
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Blackwell introductions to literature volume 16
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English
Description
This introduction to American literature and culture from 1900 to 1960 is organized around four major ideas about America: that is it “big”, “new”, “rich”, and “free”.
Illustrates the artistic and social climate in the USA during this period.
Juxtaposes discussion of history, popular culture, literature and other art forms in ways that foster discussion, ...
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"With her golden lasso and her bullet-deflecting bracelets, Wonder Woman is a beloved icon of female strength in a world of male superheroes. But this close look at her history portrays a complicated heroine who is more than just a female Superman. The original Wonder Woman was ahead of her time, advocating female superiority and the benefits of matriarchy in the 1940s. At the same time, her creator filled the comics with titillating bondage imagery,...
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"Mythologized as the era of the "good war" and the "Greatest Generation," the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the...
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"What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you've never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by "rotten girls," swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua,...
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"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1991"
Using an illuminating method that challenges the popular notion of Romanticism as aesthetic escapism, Theodore Ziolkowski explores five institutions--mining, law, madhouses, universities, and museums--that provide the socio-historical context for German Romantic culture. He shows how German writers and thinkers helped to shape these five institutions, all of which assumed their modern form during...
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What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity...
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English
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In the summer of 1958, a 12-year-old girl took the world by storm. Lolita was published in the United States and since then, her name has been taken in vain to serve a wide range of dubious ventures, both artistic and commercial. Offering a full consideration of not only the Lolita effect but shifting attitudes toward the mix of sex, children, and popular entertainment from Victorian times to the present, this study explores the movies, theatrical...
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Vonnegut in Fact offers a thorough assessment of the artistry of Kurt Vonnegut, known not only as the best-selling author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Timequake, and a dozen other novels, but also as the most widely recognized public spokesperson among writers since Mark Twain. Jerome Klinkowitz traces the emergence of Vonnegut's nonfiction since the 1960s, when commentary and feature journalism replaced the rapidly dying short story market. Offering close...
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In cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture. By examining their various 'texts'--conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts--David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.
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Everyday Reading is the first full-length critical study of the culture surrounding American popular and commercial poetry in the twentieth century. Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers in different and complex ways....
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Timothy B. Powell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the editor of Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context.
In Ruthless Democracy, Timothy Powell reimagines the canonical origins of "American" identity by juxtaposing authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau with Native American, African American, and women authors. Taking his title from Melville, Powell identifies...
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Until now, Eugene O'Neill's psychological dramas have been analyzed mainly by critics who relied on obvious parallels between O'Neill's life, his family, and his plays. In this theoretically expansive and interdisciplinary book, Joel Pfister reassesses what was at stake ideologically in O'Neill's staging and modernizing of 'psychological' individualism for his social class. Pfister examines the history of the middle-class family and of Freudian pop...
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"C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other members of the Inklings met each week to read and discuss each other's work-in-progress, offering both encouragement and blistering critique. How did these conversations shape the books they were writing? How does creative collaboration enhance each individual talent? And what can we learn from their example? Beautifully illustrated by James A. Owen, Bandersnatch offers an inside look at the Inklings of Oxford...
20) Victorian pain
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English
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"The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, Victorian Pain offers a compelling new literary and philosophical...
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