You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
After its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, naturalism, a genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control, was supplanted by modernism, a genre in which writers experimented with innovations in form and content. In the last decade, the movement is again attracting spirited scholarly debate. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism takes stock of the best new research in the field through collecting twenty-eight original essays drawing upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies. The contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of writers from S...
Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.
An innovative collection of essays examining the sometimes paradoxical alignment of Realism and Naturalism with the Gothic in American literature to highlight their shared qualities Following the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation. At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with...
With his novels, journalism, short stories, political activism, and travel writing, Jack London established himself as one of the most prolific and diverse authors of the twentieth century. Covering London's biography, cultural context, and the various genres in which he wrote, The Oxford Handbook of Jack London is the definitive reference work on the author.
The literature of the antebellum South has often been described in literary histories as little more than glorified propaganda for the aristocratic, slave-owning class. While this might pertain to the region’s historical romances that feature a dashing, resolute hero committed to upholding the dearly held institutions of slave-holding society and that relegate women and African Americans to roles as meek supporters or loyal comic sideshows, this view does not describe all of the South’s literature from this period.In Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South, Paul C. Jones argues that there was a subversive group of voices that dared challenge cherished southern tradit...
As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, novels about politically active women became increasingly common. This work examines how the fiction written about the women's rights and related movements contributed to the creation and continued vitality of those movements. It looks at novels as paradigms of feminist activism.
Challenging the conventional understandings of literary naturalism defined primarily through its male writers, Donna M. Campbell examines the ways in which American women writers wrote naturalistic fiction and redefined its principles for their own purposes. Bitter Tastes looks at examples from Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and others and positions their work within the naturalistic canon that arose near the turn of the twentieth century. Campbell further places these women writers in a broader context by tracing their relationship to early film, which, like naturalism, claimed the ability to represent elemental social truths through a documentary method. Women had a significant presence in early film and constituted 40 percent of scenario writers--in many cases they also served as directors and producers. Campbell explores the features of naturalism that assumed special prominence in women's writing and early film and how the work of these early naturalists diverged from that of their male counterparts in important ways.
In American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle, Kirsten MacLeod examines the rise of a new print media form - the little magazine - and its relationship to the transformation of American cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Though the little magazine has long been regarded as the preserve of modernist avant-gardes and elite artistic coteries, for whom it served as a form of resistance to mass media, MacLeod's detailed study of its origins paints a different picture. Combining cultural, textual, literary, and media studies criticism, MacLeod demonstrates how the little magazine was deeply connected to the artistic, social, political, and cultural interests of a rising professional-managerial class. She offers a richly contextualized analysis of the little magazine's position in the broader media landscape: namely, its relationship to old and new media, including pre-industrial print forms, newspapers, mass-market magazines, fine press books, and posters. MacLeod's study challenges conventional understandings of the little magazine as a genre and emphasizes the power of "little" media in a mass-market context.
Jasmin Humburg provides evidence of naturalist narrative strategies, tropes, and character variations in six contemporary American television series: The Wire, Tremé, Shameless, Ozark, Orange is the New Black and 2 Broke Girls. The author investigates how poverty is negotiated through classic literary naturalism and contemporary televisual articulations, and how the latter may have been influenced by the former in the age of the Great Recession. By connecting literary studies, television studies, and concepts of social mobility, this project contributes to the field of new poverty studies.
The author analyzes three books on escapism and the various ways in which it is represented in them. He focuses on Alex Garland’s backpacker cult novel 'The Beach' and William Sutcliffe’s satire of the gap-year traveler 'Are You Experienced?' as well as Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book 'Into the Wild'.The first part of the analysis deals with the influence of literary genres like the Bildungsroman and travel literature. Unreliable narration as a narrative strategy is taken into consideration, as well as the colonial subtext of 'The Beach' and 'Are You Experienced?'. In 'Into the Wild' nature writing and road narratives are an integral part of the narrative.The second part deals with cultural aspects such as questions of authenticity that are raised during the narratives, the role of drugs as a means of escape, and also the problematic relationship between travelers and tourists. Finally, the author compares two film adaptations, Danny Boyle’s 'The Beach' (2000) and Sean Penn’s 'Into the Wild' (2007), with their corresponding literary source texts.