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New Essays on Walden
This review of Thoreau's classic contains a short biography of the author, an account of the writing of Walden, and a summary of other critical views.
Death of a Nation
In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has...
The World that is the Book
The World that is the Book offers an in-depth analysis of Paul Auster’s fiction. It explores the rich literary and cultural sources that Auster taps into in order to create compelling stories that investigate the nature of language, the workings of chance, and the individual’s complex relations with the world at large. Whereas most Auster criticism has concentrated on readings of individual novels, this book emphasizes the continuity in Auster’s writing by discussing throughout the philosophical underpinnings that lead the author to question the boundaries separating the fictional from the factual, and the real from the imagined.
Melville’s Anatomies
"What Otter has done better than most contemporary readers of Melville is to bring Melville's obsession with rhetoric and with authorship into alignment with those political issues and to capture fully the context of Melville's concerns."—Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans
Richard Wright's Native Son
Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is one of the most violent and revolutionary works in the American canon. Controversial and compelling, its account of crime and racism remain the source of profound disagreement both within African-American culture and throughout the world. This guide to Wright's provocative novel offers: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Native Son a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of reprinted critical essays on Native Son, by James Baldwin, Hazel Rowley, Antony Dawahare, Claire Eby and James Smethurst, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section a chronology to help place the novel in its historical context suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Native Son and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Wright's text.
The Power of Culture
"We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in sensibility, and 'cultural' history is the rubric under which a massive doubting and refiguring of our most cherished historical assumptions is being conducted. Many historians are coming to suspect that the idea of culture has the power to restore order to the study of the past. Whatever its potency as an organizing theme, there is no doubt about the power of the term 'culture' to evoke and stand for the depth of the re-examination not taking place. At a time of deep intellectual disarray, 'culture' offers a provisional, nominalist version of coherence: whatever the fragmentation of knowledge, however centrifugal the spinning of the scholarly whee...
From Puritanism to Postmodernism
Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.
Positioning the New
This ground-breaking edited volume includes chapters which explore the past, present and future position of Chinese American authors within the framework of what Harold Bloom identifies as the “Western literary canon.” These selections, which simultaneously represent the exciting “transnational turn” in American literary studies, not only examine whether or not Chinese American literature is inside or outside the canon, but also question if there is, or should be, a literary canon at all. Moreover, they dissect the canonicity of Chinese American literature by elucidating the social, political and cultural implications of inclusion in the canon. Ultimately, however, this collection is designed as a preliminary step towards exploring the impact of Chinese American literature on the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant-dominated American literary world, and probing the by-products of both cultural fusion and cultural collision.
The Fate of Translation
With two essays devoted to Wordsworth, The Fate of Translation reframes the discussion of Hesperian aesthetics initiated in Robert Eisenhauer's Mythic Paradigms, suggesting how the question of translation poses itself at the crossing of textual high- and low-roads: on the one hand, in the critical and scholarly debate concerning the relevance of Goethe's «Der Wandrer» (in the English version by William Taylor) to the primal/primary scene of autobiography and, on the other, in the reprojection of supernatural agency (numen) in the context of the Literature of Power. Confrontational deixis and a hermeneutic counterturn energize Wordsworth's self-assertive resensing of antiquity and modernity...
David Lynch and the American West
This collection convenes diverse analyses of David Lynch's newly conceived, dreamlike neo-noir representations of the American West, a first in studies of regionalism and indigeneity in his films. Twelve essays and three interviews address Lynch's image of the American West and its impact on the genre. Fans and scholars of David Lynch's work will find a study of his interpretations of the West as place and myth, spanning from his first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), through the third season of Twin Peaks in 2017. Symbols of the West in Lynch's work can be as obvious as an Odessa, Texas street sign or as subtle as the visual themes rooted in indigenous artistry. Explorations of cowboy masculinity, violence, modern frontier narratives and representations of indigeneity are all included in this collection.
