Bøger i Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture serien

In Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story Professor Jerome Loving provides an intuitive and 'interiorized' reading of the poet's most important works.

Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.

"Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society"--

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores the role that representations of poor white people play in shaping both middle-class American identity and major American literary movements and genres across the long twentieth century. Jolene Hubbs reveals that, more often than not, poor white characters imagined by middle-class writers embody what better-off people are anxious to distance themselves from in a given moment. Poor white southerners are cast as social climbers during the status-conscious Gilded Age, country rubes in the modern era, racist obstacles to progress during the civil rights struggle, and junk food devotees in the health-conscious 1990s. Hubbs illuminates how Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and Barbara Robinette Moss swam against these tides, pioneering formal innovations with an eye to representing poor white characters in new ways.

Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era argues that a new, post-postmodern aesthetic emerges in the 1990s as a group of American writers - including Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others - grapples with the political triumph of free-market ideology. The book shows how these writers resist the anti-social qualities of this frantic right-wing shift while still performing its essential gesture, the personalization of otherwise irreducible social antagonisms. Thus, we see these writers reinvent political struggles as differences in values and emotions, in fictions that explore non-antagonistic social forms like families, communities and networks. Situating these formally innovative fictions in the context of the controversies that have defined this rightward shift - including debates over free trade, welfare reform, and family values - Brooks details how American writers and politicians have reinvented liberalism for the age of pro-capitalist consensus.

Phonographs, tapes, stereo LPs, digital remix - how did these remarkable technologies impact American writing? This book explores how twentieth-century writers shaped the ways we listen in our multimedia present. Uncovering a rich new archive of materials, this book offers a resonant reading of how writers across several genres, such as John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, William S. Burroughs, and others, navigated the intermedial spaces between texts and recordings. Numerous scholars have taken up remix - a term co-opted from DJs and sound engineers - as the defining aesthetic of twenty-first century art and literature. Others have examined modernism's debt to the phonograph. But in the gap between these moments, one finds that the reciprocal relationship between the literary arts and sonic technologies continued to evolve over the twentieth century. A mix of American literary history, sound studies, and media archaeology, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars, students, and audiophiles.

The Poetics of Insecurity addresses a key concern of modern America - security - through close readings of American literary works. It combines literary studies with the philosophy of time and sociological theories of modernity, and provides new approaches to canonical American authors from the past two centuries.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

Salem Story engages the story of the Salem witch trials by contrasting an analysis of the surviving primary documentation with the way events of 1692 have been mythologised by our culture. Resisting the temptation to explain the Salem witch trials in the context of an inclusive theoretical framework, the book examines a variety of individual motives that converged to precipitate the witch-hunt. Of the many assumptions about the Salem witch trials, the most persistent is that they were instigated by a circle of hysterical girls. Through an analysis of what actually happened - by perusal of the primary materials with the 'close reading' approach of a literary critic - a different picture emerges, one where 'hysteria' inappropriately describes the logical, rational strategies of accusation and confession followed by the accusers, males and females alike.

Throughout its history, America has been the scene of multiple encounters between communities speaking different languages. Literature has long sought to represent these encounters in various ways, from James Fenimore Cooper's frontier fictions to the Jewish-American writers who popularised Yiddish as a highly influential modern vernacular. While other studies have concentrated on isolated parts of this history, Lawrence Rosenwald's book is the first to consider the whole story of linguistic representation in American literature, and to consider as well how multilingual fictions can be translated and incorporated into a national literary history. He uses case studies to analyse the most important kinds of linguistic encounters, such as those between Europeans and Native Americans, those between slaveholders and African slaves, and those between immigrants and American citizens. This ambitious, engaging book is an important contribution to the study of American literature, history and culture.

This study examines how black writers use visual tropes as literary devices to challenge readers' conceptions of black identity. Lena Hill charts two hundred years of African American literary history, from Phillis Wheatley to Ralph Ellison, and engages with a variety of canonical and lesser-known writers.

Wild Abandon serves scholars and students of American literature, environment, and postwar history. It chronicles the environmental movement's development and interaction with identity politics in the late 20th century, focusing on psychoanalysis's influence on environmentalism, and its impact on literary representations of nature and ecology.

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson locates a paradoxical question - how does one prepare to be surprised? - at the heart of several major modernist texts. Arguing that this paradox of perception gives rise to an American literary methodology, this book dramatically reframes how practices of reading and writing evolved among modernist authors after Emerson. Whereas Walter Benjamin defines modernity as a 'series of shocks' inflicted from without, Emerson offers a countervailing optic that regards life as a 'series of surprises' unfolding from within. While Benjaminian shock elicits intimidation and defensiveness, Emersonian surprise fosters states of responsiveness and spontaneity whereby unexpected encounters become generative rather than enervating. As a study of how such states of responsiveness were cultivated by a post-Emerson tradition of writers and thinkers, this project displaces longstanding models of modernist perception defined by shock's passive duress, and proposes alternate models of reception that proceed from the active practice of surprise.

This book combines close literary readings with detailed considerations of visual media to demonstrate that key American authors of the past two centuries created new literary forms by reworking the immediacy effects of photography, film, and TV. It will appeal to scholars of American literature.

From Walt Whitman to the contemporary period, the long poem has been one of the more dynamic, intricate, and yet challenging literary practices of modernity. Addressing those challenges, Writing in Real Time combines systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics to interpret a broad range of American long poems as emergent systems, capable of adaptation and transformation in response to environmental change. Due to these emergent properties, the long poem performs essential cultural work, offering a unique experience of history that remains valuable for our rapidly transforming digital age. Moving across a broad range of literary and theoretical texts, Writing in Real Time demonstrates that the study of emergence can enhance literary scholarship, just as literature provides unique insights into emergent properties, making this book a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.

Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture examines Pynchon's novels in their relation to 1960s counterculture. Much has been made of Pynchon's ambiguity, but in this volume, Joanna Freer offers a concrete account of Pynchon's politics, thereby emphasising commentaries within Pynchon's fiction on the Beats, the New Left, the Black Panther Party, the psychedelic movement and the women's movement.

This volume explores the way in which antebellum American writers perceived the political implications of modern philosophical skepticism. Dominic Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors - Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass and Jacobs - and illumines their thinking about revolution, civil war, and the world's susceptibility to transformation.

Freeburg analyzes how Melville grapples with realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America by examining the important role that 'blackness' plays in Melville's fiction. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.

Tim Armstrong explores the cultural metaphors underpinning slavery and its legacy using a range of American art and literature, focusing especially on the writings of African-American authors like Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison.

In this study, Larson reads the literature of the pre-Civil War United States against Tocqueville's theories of equality. Imagining Equality tests these theories in the work of a broad array of authors and genres, and in doing so discovers important new themes in Stowe, Hawthorne, Douglass and Alcott.

New scientific discoveries about the nerves inspired writers like Hawthorne and Beecher Stowe to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Asher investigates the effect of politics on the work of T. S. Eliot, particularly the influence of French reactionary thinking. The result is a re-appraisal of Eliot's view of literary history and theory, and new readings of major poems and plays. Asher also discusses how Eliot's ideology altered the study of literature for subsequent generations of critics.

Poe is frequently portrayed as an isolated idiosyncratic genius who was unwilling or unable to adapt himself to the cultural conditions of his time. In this text, Eliza Richards revises this portrayal through an exploration of his collaborations and rivalries with his female contemporaries.

Professor Miller examines prominent writers and painters of nineteenth-century America who explored the scenery of swamps, jungles, and other wastelands. Through this examination, Miller discusses the changing social realities around the Civil War and the deep-seated personal pressures that the urbanised and technological environment had on these artists.

With a writer of Faulkner's scope and subtlety even the study of his beginnings is a challenging task. How did the young man who imitated Swinburne's verse and Beardsley's drawings develop into the author of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!?

The years after World War Two have seen a widespread fascination with the free market, going beyond individualism in expressing a desire for an entirely economic world. In this book, Michael W. Clune considers this fascination evident within postwar literature.

Theo Davis offers a fresh account of the emergence of a national literature in the United States. She analyses how American authors' prose seeks to create an art of abstract experience and reconsiders the place of form in literary studies today.

In this provocative and original study, Robert E. Abrams argues that in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, new concepts of space and landscape emerge. Abrams explores the underlying frailty of a sense of place in American literature of this period.

Examining the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America, Kerkering tells the story of how poetry helped define America as a nation before helping to define America into distinct racial categories. Through formal literary effects, national and racial identities become related elements of a single literary history.