You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Asian American War Stories examines contemporary Asian American literature that considers both the short-term and the long-term effects of war, trauma, and displacement on civilians, as well as the ways that individuals seek healing in the face of suffering. Through the works of contemporary writers like Chang-rae Lee, Ocean Vuong, Nora Okja Keller, Julie Otsuka, Lan Cao, and Lawson Inada, this book explores the ways that recent Asian American literature reflects the enduring consequences of America’s wars in Asia at the individual and collective levels. The book also considers the journeys that individuals take as they pursue healing of their traumatic wounds.
"A much-needed contribution to and critique of debates in the newly emerging field of transparency studies from the perspective of American literary studies. In the twenty-first century, transparency has become an ambiguous buzzword both in the public and the private realms (e.g. Wikileaks and the Snowden affair; social media). This volume takes its cue from the emerging field of transparency studies, recent scholarly work in sociology, political theory, and cultural studies that identifies a hegemonic rhetoric of transparency in public and political life. While scholars in this new field routinely gesture toward literature as the realm where secrecy may be productive, they rarely engage wit...
This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.
Tracing how central tensions in J.M. Coetzee's fiction converge in and are made visible by the child figure, this book establishes the centrality of the child to Coetzee's poetics. Through readings of novels from Dusklands to The Schooldays of Jesus, Charlotta Elmgren shows how Coetzee's writing stages the constant interplay between irresponsibility and responsibility-to the self, the other, and the world. In articulating this poetics of (ir)responsibility, Elmgren offers the first sustained engagement with the intersections between Coetzee's work and the philosophical thought of Giorgio Agamben. With reference also to Hannah Arendt's thinking on natality, education, and amor mundi, Elmgren ...
The book explores environmental issues in twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction and how those issues are dealt with by specific literary means. It proposes a reciprocal relationship between nature and narrative—the idea according to which nature both informs and inspires artistic creations, while literary designs and rhetoric also shape our ideas and perceptions of the natural environment. It is argued that in order to address design and rhetoric in environmental texts, we need a close analysis of those world-shaping functions of literary narratives that unite ecocritical and narratological interests. The author presents readings of contemporary novels and their varying ways of seeing nature through narrative devices and fictional minds. The novels discussed in the book are Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Ian McGuire’s The North Water, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Enon, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and Jenny Offill’s Weather.
None
"As one of the first studies exploring Morrison's archived drafts, notes, and manuscripts together with her published novels, this book offers fresh insights into her creative processes. It analyses the author's textual choices, her writerly strategies, and her process of writing, all combining in shaping her literary places"--
How do the stories we tell about Midwestern places influence or reflect our experiences? How is the literature of a place or a region relevant to the people who live there? In this expansive anthology, Andy Oler collects 72 original short essays by a diverse array of contemporary writers. Each explores locales in Midwestern literature relevant to the life and work of literary figures and canonical authors such as Toni Morrison and Willa Cather. Lingering in these places in both body and mind, the contributors contemplate the resonances and desires nurtured by their chosen location. Together, the essays take readers on an odyssey that maps our inner longing to connect across vast landscapes. A singular collection of creative nonfiction, Lingering Inland plumbs the personal and collective essence that binds Midwesterners together through words and places.
Beginning with 1894 consists mainly of the Proceedings [etc.] of the American philatelic association.