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Constructing the Literary Self
In the twentieth century, as previously excluded groups, including ethnic minorities, women, the disabled, and the differently gendered, gained a voice in society, group identity also changed and new definitions became necessary. Whether through their group affiliations or in spite of these affiliations, many individuals sought a new definition of themselves. As can be expected, much literature explores these changes and depicts the quest for new definitions and the search for individuality in the light of new definitions. Construction or definition of the self was once available only to the elite, and the freedom of some to define their identity was sacrificed so that others could make their own self-definitions; this practice can be found throughout much of history. This volume is about that kind of oppression and various strategies of escaping from oppression as depicted in serious literature. Its thirteen essays, all by recognized scholars, are divided into five categories: Race, Gender, and the Self; Assimilation and the Self; Black Males and the Self; Female Sexuality and the Self; and The Family and the Self.
Out of Touch
Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory, and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin figures in the cultural effect of changes in visual technologies, a development argued by critics to be at the heart of the contest between surface and depth and, by extension, Western globalization and identity politics. The skin has a complex history as a metaphorical terrain over which ideological wars are fought, identity is asserted through modification as in tattooing, and meaning is inscribed upon the human being. Yet even as interventions on the skin characterize much of this history, fantasy and science fiction literature and film trumpet skin's passing in the cybernetic age, and feminist theory calls for abandoning the skin as a hostile boundary.
Making of the Victorian Novelist
This book examines a sequence of crises in nineteenth-century print culture and offers an original narrative of what it meant to be a Victorian novelist. Easily dismissed at the beginning of the century as hacks who pandered to the ignorant or indolent, novelists by the end of Victoria's reign could be esteemed among the greatest of artists. Between these extremes stretches a century of ideological contention between alternative representations of authorship. Deane brings new attention in his account to the trends in publishing and the expanding market surrounding Victorian literature, such as the new modes of production, arguments over copyright legislation, and revisions of the criteria of periodical criticism. Combining literary sociology and close readings, The Making of the Victorian Novelist offers an innovative history of the material pressures and rhetorical struggles that produced - and ultimately shattered - the Victorians' understanding of their great novelists.
Balancing the Books
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.
Segregated Miscegenation
Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in Latin America. His provocative analysis traces the conceptualization of blackness in fiction and theories of the novel, and troubles the racial and ethnic categories particular to each region's literary tradition.
The House on Mango Street (Bloom's Guides)
Discusses the writing of The house on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Includes critical essays on the work and a brief biography of the author.
Beyond the Sound Barrier
Beyond the Sound Barrier examines twentieth-century fictional representations of popular music-particularly jazz-in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Kristin K. Henson argues that an analysis of musical tropes in the work of these four authors suggests that cultural "mixing" constitutes one of the central preoccupations of modernist literature. Valuable for any reader interested in the intersections between American literature and the history of American popular music, Henson situates the literary use of popular music as a culturally amalgamated, boundary-crossing form of expression that reflects and defines modern American identities.
Understanding Anne Enright
Addressed to both literary scholars and the general reader, Understanding Anne Enright is an introduction to the novels and stories of one of the most original and engaging contemporary Irish writers. It analyses developments in Enright’s writing, comparing the evolution of themes and forms from one book to another, contextualising her fiction, and interrogating the impact of concepts such as postmodernism, post-feminism and post-nationalism on the writing and reading of her work. It particularly follows the evolution of Enright’s treatment of the corporeality of women’s experiences and its correlation with the embodied language of her fiction. Thus, this book shows how Enright’s writing participates in the latest thematic and formal trends not only of Irish or British, but also of Western, literature.
Death, Men, and Modernism
Death, Men and Modernism argues that the figure of the dead man becomes a locus of attention and a symptom of crisis in British writing of the early to mid-twentieth century. While Victorian writers used dying women to dramatize aesthetic, structural, and historical concerns, modernist novelists turned to the figure of the dying man to exemplify concerns about both masculinity and modernity. Along with their representations of death, these novelists developed new narrative techniques to make the trauma they depicted palpable. Contrary to modernist genealogies, the emergence of the figure of the dead man in texts as early as Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure suggests that World War I intensified-but did not cause-these anxieties. This book elaborates a nodal point which links death, masculinity, and modernity long before the events of World War I.
