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When Kese, just out of college, starts his summer job in a small New England town, he finds himself trying to unravel a mystery. Charlotte West, rich and imperious, has been baffling the locals since she arrived in the town more than twenty years ago. Does she have a dark past--or is she just an excuse for Kese to indulge an obsession, or to avoid the encroaching boredom of his days? His investigation takes him back through the history of the town and of America itself, with its borders of class and race and bloodline.
Balancing the Books represents a sophisticated examination of the ongoing engagement of American literature with the economies of slavery through the works of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Both Faulkner and Morrison write about the relationship between race, identity, and history, and about how the legacies of slavery linger in the lives and actions of their characters, although the narrative strategies through which they render these themes ultimately diverge. Dussere brings considerations of debt and repayment, exchange and accounting, and capital and the market-concepts inseparable from any consideration of race in the construction of the American nation-into dialogue with the work of Faulkner and Morrison to produce an outstanding work of literary and cultural criticism.
Although all published biographical information on Toni Morrison agrees that her birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, John Duvall's book challenges this claim. Using new biographical information, he explores the issue of names and naming in Morrison's fiction and repeatedly finds surprising traces of the Nobel Prize-winning author's struggle to construct a useable identity as an African American woman novelist. Whatever the exact circumstances surrounding her decision to become Toni, one thing becomes clear: the question of identity was not a given for Morrison.
Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cell examines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.
Examines how key nineteenth-century American writers attempted to combat, understand, and incorporate the advent of photography in their fiction and analyzes the impact of photography on narrative histories of the nineteenth century.
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In Origins and Legacies of Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire Alistair Rolls, Clara Sitbon and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan counter the myths and received wisdom that are typically associated with this iconic French crime fiction series, namely: that it was born in Paris on a tide of postwar euphoria; that it initially consisted of translations of American hard-boiled classics by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; and that the translations were rushed and rather approximate. Instead, an alternative vision of Duhamel’s translation practice is proposed, one based on a French tradition of auto-, or “original”, translation of “ostensibly” American crime fiction, and one that appropriates the source text in order to create an allegory of the target culture.
Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping—crucial to understanding life in the southern United States—from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David A. Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture. Following the end of slavery, sharecropping initially served as an expedient solution to a practical problem, but it quickly developed into an entrenched power structure situated between slavery and freedom that exploited the labor of Blacks and poor whites to produce agricultural commodities. Sharecropping was the economic linchpin in ...
This book analyzes the work of Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston alongside biographical materials and discourses on the body. Thomas McGlamery views each of these authors' literary output as an effort to "work through" the political meanings associated with the body, examining how they negotiate identities of class, gender, race, sexuality, and age.
Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. By stressing the struggle over social classification, the book revises studies that have tied the influence of sonnet sequences to either courtly love or to Renaissance individualism. Drawing on Marxist aesthetic theory, it offers detailed examinations of sequences by Lok, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. It will be valuable to readers interested in Renaissance and genre studies, and post-Marxist theories of class.