Literary Criticism : American

This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole.: Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholars; Allows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts; Contributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction; Directs students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry; Suggests the many ways that “modern”, “American” and “fiction” carry new meanings in the twenty-first century more...

Price: $199.95

This Concise Companion offers an authoritative overview of American fiction from 1900-1950 focusing on the literature that developed out of the social, cultural, and political changes, which occurred in the first part of the 20th century. With careful reference to key authors and their works, newly-commissioned chapters examine the period's formative events, such as the Depression and the two World Wars, and their representation in literature. In addition, essays also analyze the multiple and paraadoxical self-descriptions that have been taken to define modernism, such as the 'rise of proletarian literature' and the 'high modernist' novel. Looking at issues of race, language, cosmopolitanism, and the First and Second World Wars, this volume introduces the contextual information and strategic knowledge that students need to formulate their own readings of classic American fiction. Authors such as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, who have defined our understanding of modernism for so long, are reread in relation to key texts of the period by Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. This Companion examines the original context of these authors' works and looks at its current reception to uncover how 20th-century literature is being reinterpreted in the new millennium. more...

Price: $100.00

A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature. more...

Price: $30.00

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth. A startling look at youth in our time, Consuming Youth will interest anyone concerned with film, television, and popular culture. more...

Price: $28.00

David R. Shumway contends that American literature is the product of study - the deliberate invention of a discipline seeking to define the character and legitimate the existence of a specifically American civilization. He traces the various reconstitutions of American literature by examining the discipline’s practices and techniques, discourses and structures, paradigms and unstated assumptions.This genealogy begins around 1890, when American literature as defined by institutions outside the academy, such as magazines and publishing houses, acquired much of the ideology it would display in later phases, including sexism, racism, and class bias. Singular in its treatment of American literary study as a discipline rather than as criticism and in its insistence on the cultural and political work carried on by this discipline, Creating American Civilization will engage literary theorists and historians as well as individuals with an interest in American literature. more...

Price: $72.00