General

Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model of rational exposition institutionalized under the...

Wayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time, most notably the 1961 classic "The Rhetoric of Fiction", a book that transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for advanced discussions of how...

In "Culture, Genre and Literary Vocation" Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on 19th-century American writers - originally written for such...

Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, Workings of the Spirit weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against Baker's own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of...

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas, an embodiment of the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people...

Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist writing in early America. There has been a spate of related works recently, but Philip Gould's narrative offers a completely different view of the loyalist/patriot contentions than appears in...

Lin Shu, Inc. explores the dynamic interactions between literary translation, commercial publishing, and the politics of "traditional" Chinese culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It breaks new ground as the first...

American pragmatism is premised on the notion that to find out what something is, look to fruits rather than roots. But the thought of the classical pragmatists is itself the fruit, this book argues, of earlier literary experiments in American literature...

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as'animality studies' that focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments, without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book...

This study explores Walt Whitman's contradictory response to and embrace of several great prior British poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth (with shorter essays on Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). Through reference...

The greed, excess, and decadence of the long 1980s has been famously chronicled, critiqued, and satirized in epochal works like White Noise by Don DeLillo, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leigh Claire La...

American Guy examines American norms of masculinity and their role in the law, bringing a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives to the intersection of American gender, legal, and literary issues. The collection opens with a set of papers...

Transoceanic America offers a new approach to American literature by emphasizing the material and conceptual interconnectedness of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. These oceans were tied together economically, textually, and politically, through such...

This bracing and far-ranging study compares modern (post-1492) literary treatments of millenarian narratives-"end of the world" stories charting an ultimate battle between good and evil that destroys previous social structures and rings in a...

This book explores the mental and literary awakening that many working-class women in the United States experienced when they left the home and began to work in factories early in the nineteenth century. Cook also examines many of the literary...

John Muthyala's Reworlding America moves beyond the U.S.-centered approach of traditional American literary criticism. In this groundbreaking book, Muthyala argues for a transgeographical perspective from which to study the literary and cultural...

Moon City Review 2009 is a newly established book annual intermingling poetry, story (both fiction and creative nonfiction), visual art, and timely cultural and literary criticism. Featuring the invited work of nationally renowned authors, ""MCR 2009""...

Around 1825, the point at which emigration generally (and to Canada in particular) began to be seen as a cure for widespread poverty and joblessness in England, certain English writers began arguing that the vocation of middle-class emigrants was to...

As New York and Paris began to modernie, new modes of entertainment, such as panoramas, dioramas, and photography, seemed poised to take the place of the more complex forms of literary expression. Dioramas and photography were invented in Paris but soon...

Industry and the Creative Mind takes a radically new look at the figure of the eccentric, alienated writer in American literature and entertainment from 1790 to 1860. Traditional scholarship takes for granted that the eccentric writer, modeled by such...

In 1999, Michigan State University Press launched Fourth Genre: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, a journal devoted to publishing notable, innovative work in nonfiction. The title reflected our intention to give nonfiction its due as a literary genre...

The time is right for a critical reassessment of Cold War culture both because its full cultural impact remains unprocessed and because some of the chief paradigms for understanding that culture confuse rather than clarify.A collection of the work of...

For centuries, people have been thinking and writing - and fiercely debating - about the meaning of marriage. Today, politicians speak often of "defending" or "protecting" this institution, but just a hundred years ago, Progressive-era reformers embraced...

The story of southern writing - the Dixie Limited, if you will - runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white partiarchy and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger...

'The Fugitive's Properties' uncovers a poetics of intangible, personified property emerging out of antebellum laws, circulating through key 19th century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrel performance and early...

"If Nationality means anything and in [the American] case it couldn t mean race it must mean the unconscious response of a people to their natural environment." Mary Austin Celebrated and controversial author Mary Austin (1866-1934) lived in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780870498862Author Michael A. LofaroFormat PaperbackPage Count 184Imprint University of Tennessee PressPublisher University of Tennessee Press

The Jester and the Sages approaches the life and work of Mark Twain by placing him in conversation with three eminent philosophers of his time - Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Unprecedented in Twain scholarship, this interdisciplinary...

Managing Literacy, Mothering America accomplishes two monumental tasks. It identifies and defines a previously unstudied genre, the domestic literacy narrative, and provides a pioneering cultural history of this genre from the early days of the United...

Miles of Stare explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists. The...

Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories posits that the Crescent City and the surrounding Louisiana bayous were a logical setting for the literary exploration of crucial social problems in America. Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories is a study of...

Marcia Jacobson's Being a Boy Again identifies a literary genre that flourished between the Civil War and World War I - the American boy book. Jacobson distinguishes the boy book tradition from the didactic story for boys and the developmental...

Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature A scholar accompanies Twain on his journey around the world In Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now, Susan K. Harris follows Twain's last lecture tour as he wound...

Exploring the deep and enduring relationship between music and literature, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature examines the diverse ways in which African American "hot" music influenced American culture particularly...

Providing an exhaustive compendium of publications by and citations about Alabama-born writer William March, William March: An Annotated Checklist offers an invaluable resource that traces in meticulous detail the arc of March's writing, the popular and...

Well-researched analysis of the impact that Spain and Spanish America had on antebellum literature in the United States. In Hispanicism and Early US Literature, author John C. Havard posits that representations of Spain, Spanish America, Spanishness,...

In this fascinating study, Chris Messenger posits F. Scott Fitzgerald as a great master of sentiment in modern American fiction. Sentimental forms both attracted and repelled Fitzgerald while defining his deepest nature in prose. Messenger demonstrates...

Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side,...

The Forsaken Son engages the provocative coincidence of the vocabularies of infanticide and Christianity, specifically atonement theology, in six modern American novels: Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, the first two installments of John...

This important collection presents Gertrude Stein for the first time in her brilliant modernity. Ulla E. Dydo's textual scholarship demonstrates Stein's constant questioning of convention, and A Stein Reader changes the balance of work in print,...