Browse

The ten chapters in this book stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers, and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. The book explores the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and addresses together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy that ‘fatherlands’ and ‘mother tongues’ are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and ‘nativist’ obsessions with the purity of the ‘mother tongue.’ At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond. Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of his peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism and modernism.

The American Short Story Cycle spans two centuries to tell the history of a genre that includes major and marginal authors, from Washington Irving through William Faulkner to Jhumpa Lahiri. The short story cycle rose and proliferated because its form compellingly renders the uncertainties that emerge from the twin pillars of modern America culture: individualism and pluralism. Short story cycles reflect how individuals adapt to change, whether it is the railroad coming to the small town in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) or social media revolutionizing language in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Each chapter examines how cycles use temporal and spatial settings and characterization to link the stories within. Doing so reveals that authors turn to the cycle when exploring identities—be they gendered or ethnic—in flux and when experimenting with the conventions of narrative unity, from regionalist through modernist to contemporary writers. This book constructs a history of community, family, and time in American culture through one of the nation’s most popular, yet unrecognized genres. Combining new formalism in literary criticism with scholarship in American Studies, this book gives a name and theory to the genre that has fostered the aesthetics of fragmentation, as well as recurrence, that characterize fiction today.

This book examines the way American writers present the effects of trauma in their work. Trauma has become an important and influential paradigm for reading contemporary American literature. Too often, however, criticism has adopted narrow models of trauma, resulting in increasingly formulaic and clichéd interpretations. This study understands trauma on a wider basis than Freudian psychoanalysis, incorporating theories drawn from fields including narratology, in order to analyse devices characteristically employed by writers in order to represent and, often, to mimic the effects of trauma. The study also focuses on important issues often overlooked by conventional analyses of trauma, such as the characteristics and effects of perpetrator narratives. The book explores narrative devices and innovations, such as metafiction, as well as events in contemporary America, including 9/11, the Iraq War, and reactions to the Bush administration. American authors discussed in depth include Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien, Lorrie Moore, Mark Danielewski, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anthony Swofford, Joel Tunipseed, Evan Wright, Kayla Williams, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Michael Chabon. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives offers a timely and dissenting intervention into debates about American writers’ depiction of trauma and its consequences.

This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. She wrote novels before and after The Bell Jar. Most criticism, however, still focuses on her poetry, neglecting this large and significant body of her work. Many of her short stories have never been discussed before. Discussing all her novels and stories, and based on research in the three major archives of her work, this book is the complete study of Plath's fiction. The author analyses her influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses in her fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society. In each case, Plath's work is set in the cultural context of the discourses and practices of the American 1950s.

This book is a collection of essays on an iconic American periodical, providing new insights into twentieth-century literary culture. The book reads across and between The New Yorker departments, from sports writing to short stories, cartoons to reporters at large, poetry to annals of business. Attending to the relations between these kinds of writing and the magazine's visual and material constituents, the book examines the distinctive ways in which imaginative writing has inhabited the ‘prime real estate’ of this enormously influential periodical. In bringing together a range of sharply angled analyses of particular authors, styles, columns, and pages, the book offers multiple perspectives on American writing and periodical culture at specific moments in twentieth-century history. The book features new perspectives on major American writers in relation to their first publication contexts; it reconsiders modern and contemporary American writing and periodical culture, focusing critical attention on commercially successful ‘smart’ magazines; it draws on new research in The New Yorker's manuscript and digital archives; and, a distinctive combination of close critical reading and cultural analysis.

Writing Nature is the first full-length ecocritical study of Cold War American literature. The book analyses the function and representation of Nature in a wide range of Cold War texts, and reveals the prevalence of portrayals of Nature as an infinite, interdependent ecological system in American literature written between 1945 and 1971. It also highlights the Cold War’s often overlooked role in environmental history, and argues for the repositioning of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) within what is shown to be a developing trend of ecological presentations of Nature in literature written after 1945. Ecocritical analysis is combined with historicist research to expose the unacknowledged role of a globally diverse range of non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies in shaping Cold War writers’ ecological presentations of Nature, including Sufism, Taoism and Zen Buddhism. The book contains chapters on J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles and Mary McCarthy. It also introduces the regional writer Peggy Pond Church, exploring the synergies between the depictions of Nature in her writings and in those of her neighbour and correspondent, the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The place and function of Nature in each writer’s work is assessed in relation to the most recent developments in the field of ecocriticism, and each of the book’s six author case studies is investigated through a combination of textual analysis and detailed archival and historicist research.