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Racial Blasphemies, using critical race theory and literary analysis, charts the tense, frustrated religious language that saturates much twentieth-century American literature. Michael Cobb argues that we should consider religious language as a special kind of language - a language of curse words - that furiously communicates not theology or spirituality as much as it signals the sheer difficulty of representing race in a non-racist manner on the literary page.
This collection presents the first scholarly attempt to map the rapidly emerging field of mixed-race literature, defined as texts written by authors who represent multiple cultural and literary traditions. It also situates these literatures in relation to contemporary fields of literary inquiry.
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.
First Published in 2005. This study focuses on a group of related texts which have struggled to rescue, rather than eliminate, the paradox of answering the original question: Why ethics rather than nothing?
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Between 1800 and the First World War, white middle-class men were depicted various forms of literature as weak and nervous. This book explores cultural writings dedicated to the physical and mental health of the male subject, showing that men have mobilized gender constructions repeatedly and self-consciously to position themselves within the culture. Aiming to join those who offer nuanced accounts of masculinity, Devlin investigates the various and changing interests white manhood was positioned to cultivate and the ways elite white men used "their own," so to speak, to promote larger agendas for their class and race.
First Published in 2005. The main purpose of the book is to expand the scope of revisionary studies of the thirties by analyzing novels using recent innovations in critical theory. The book adds to the research of Barbara Foley, Michael Denning, Alan Wald, and others who have challenged Cold-War-era accounts of the decade's socialist and communist culture. The book explores leftist literature from the thirties as balanced between two antithetical philosophical modalities: identity and ideology. Writers create identitarian fiction, he argues, as they attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience using familiar types and patterns culled from mass culture. They engage ideology, on the other hand, when they use narrative as a means of critiquing those same types and patterns using strategies of ideological critique similar to those of their European contemporary Georg Lukcs.
An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African American and Native American descent, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote is the first book to theorize an African-Native American literary tradition. In examining this overlooked tradition, the book prompts a reconsideration of interracial relations in American history and literature. Jonathan Brennan, in a sweeping historical and analytical introduction to this collection of essays, surveys several centuries of literature in the context of the historical and cultural exchange and development of distinct African-Native American traditions. Positing a new African-Native American literary theory, he illuminates the ro...
At once criminal and savior, clown and creator, antagonist and mediator, the character of trickster has made frequent appearances in works by writers the world over. Usually a figure both culturally specific and transcendent, trickster leads the way to the unconscious, the concealed, and the seemingly unattainable. This book offers thirteen interpretations of trickster in American writing, including essays on works by African America, Native America, Pacific Rim, and Latino writers, as well as an examination of trickster politics. This collection conveys the trickster's imprint on the modern world.