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The first full-length scholarly study of Peyton Place, Grace Metalious's classic story of New England indiscretion
Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture. --
A passionate advocate of identity studies and a keen reader of U.S. institutional politics, Robyn Wiegman turns her attention in Object Lessons to the critical practices and political ambitions of identity-based fields. In a series of case studies drawn from womens studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, and American studies, she examines the unspoken belief that better theory will produce progressive social change in order to consider the political desire that fuels current scholarly debate. Her metacritical analysis is neither a defense nor a dismissal of such political commitment but a sustained inquiry into the hope it generates, the thinking it inspires, and the conformity it inadvertently demands.
Sexual violence is a significant problem within many Western militaries. Despite international attention to the issue and global #MeToo and #TimesUp movements highlighting the impact of sexual violence, rates of sexual violence are going up in many militaries. This book uses feminist theories of 'rape culture' and institutional gaslighting to identify the key stories, myths, and misconceptions about military sexual violence that have obstructed addressing and preventing it. It is a landmark study that considers nearly thirty years of media coverage of military sexual violence in three case countries – the US, Canada and Australia. The findings have implications not only for those seeking to address, reduce, and prevent sexual violence in militaries, but also for those hoping to understanding rape culture and how patriarchy operates more broadly. It will appeal to students, scholars and general readers interested in gender, feminism and the military.
Art cinema has always had an aura of the erotic, with the term being at times a euphemism for European films that were more explicit than their American counterparts. This focus on sexuality, whether buried or explicit, has meant a recurrence of the theme of rape, nearly as ubiquitous as in mainstream film. This anthology explores the representation of rape in art cinema. Its aim is to highlight the prevalence and multiple functions of rape in this prestigious mode of filmmaking as well as to question the meaning of its ubiquity and versatility. Rape in Art Cinema takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together recognized figures such as historian Joanna Burke, philosopher Ann J. Cahill, and film scholars Martin Barker, Tanya Horeck and Scott Mackenzie alongside emerging voices. It is international in scope, with contributors from Canada, the U.S. and Britain coming together to investigate the representation of rape in some of cinema's most cherished films.
There is no poetry without memory. Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry is devoted to the ways in which poetic texts shape, and are shaped by, personal, collective, and cultural memory. It looks at the manifold and often transgressive techniques through which the past is recovered and repurposed in poetry. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Susan Howe’s THIS THAT, Lyn Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory, John Tranter’s “The Anaglyph,” Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” and Amy Clampitt’s “Nothing Stays Put” are only some of the texts discussed in this volume by a group of international poetry experts. They specifically focus on the effects of the cultural interaction, mixture, translation, and hybridization of memory of, in, and mediated by poetry. Poetic memory, as becomes strikingly clear, may be founded on the past, but has everything to do with the cultural present of poets and readers, and with their hopes and fears for the future.
America's sense of space has always been tied to what Hayden White called the narrativization of real events. If the awe-inspiring manifestations of nature in America (Niagara Falls, Virginia's Natural Bridge, the Grand Canyon, etc.) were often used as a foil for projecting utopian visions and idealizations of the nation's exceptional place among the nations of the world, the rapid technological progress and its concomitant appropriation of natural spaces served equally well, as David Nye argues, to promote the dominant cultural idiom of exploration and conquest. From the beginning, American attitudes towards space were thus utterly contradictory if not paradoxical; a paradox that scholars t...
In the last twenty years, how has U.S.-American writing and the reading public responded to the complexity of an American culture resolutely situated in a larger, highly politicized, globalized world undergoing radical change? The 20th-century modes of realism and postmodernism have been succeeded by writerly practices that are that are invested in the idea of embodied ‘authenticity’ and that are relatable to neorealism, whether it be via outright affirmation or critical experimentation and appropriation. The individual case studies mark the ways in which postmillennial U.S.-American writing is marked by an ongoing awareness toward complexity and the entanglement of writers and the reading public with pressing political concerns, and, at times oppressive, social and economic discursive and structural formations. These contributions further attest to how narrative and structural complexity, grammatical and lexical sophistication, and social nuance endure as the main literary modes of confronting 21st-century political life. This volume is thus of interest for both the study of U.S.-American political culture and U.S.-American literature.