This book explores how confessional poets in the 1950s and 1960s US responded to a Cold War political climate that used the threat of nuclear disaster and communist infiltration as affective tools for the management of public life. In an era that witnessed the state-sanctioned repression of civil liberties, poets such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Randall Jarrell adopted what has often been considered a politically benign confessional style. Although confessional writers have been criticized for emphasizing private turmoil in an era...
This book explores how confessional poets in the 1950s and 1960s US responded to a Cold War political climate that used the t...
This book builds upon recent theoretical approaches that define queerness as more of a temporal orientation than a sexual one to explore how Edgar Allan Poe's literary works were frequently invested in imagining lives that contemporary readers can understand as queer, as they stray outside of or aggressively reject normative life paths, including heterosexual romance, marriage, and reproduction, and emphasize individuals' present desires over future plans. The book's analysis of many of Poe's best-known works, including "The Raven," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The...
This book builds upon recent theoretical approaches that define queerness as more of a temporal orientation than a sexual one to explore how Edgar All...
This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens’s poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger’s theories as a framework through which Stevens’s poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and...
This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens’s poetry u...
This book is an interdisciplinary study of antebellum American literature and the problem of political emergency. Arguing that the United States endured sustained conflicts over the nature and operation of sovereignty in the unsettled era from the Founding to the Civil War, the book presents two forms of governance: local and regional control, and national governance. The period’s states of exception arose from these clashing imperatives, creating contests over land, finance, and, above all, slavery, that drove national politics. Extensively employing the political and cultural insights of...
This book is an interdisciplinary study of antebellum American literature and the problem of political emergency. Arguing that the United States endur...
This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism—understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective reality—by bringing together analyses of some of the ways in which American writers have responded to the derealization of political culture in the United States and the experience of a ‘new’ American reality after 2016. The volume’s premise is that the disruptions and dislocations that were so exacerbated by the political ascendancy of Trump and his spectacle-laden presidency have unsettled core assumptions about American reality and...
This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism—understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective ...
This volume presents a collection of critical essays that center women’s friendship in women’s literary and artistic production. Analyzing cultural portrayals of women’s friendships in fiction, letters, and film, these essays collectively suggest new models of literary interpretation that do not prioritize heterosexual romance. Instead, this book represents friendships as mature and meaningful relationships that contribute to identity formation and political coalition. Both the supportive and competitive aspects of friendships are shown to be crucial to women’s identities as...
This volume presents a collection of critical essays that center women’s friendship in women’s literary and artistic production. Analyzing cultura...
This book examines the literature of African-American author Richard Wright and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, arguing that Wright was not only the foremost proponent of minoritarian protest literature, but also a groundbreaking minoritarian exponent of philosophical literature. In presenting this argument, the volume defends trolley problems from the criticism that some philosophers level against them by promoting their use as an interpretive tool for literary scholars. Starting with Martha C. Nussbaum’s interventions in literary theory concerning Henry James and perceptive...
This book examines the literature of African-American author Richard Wright and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, arguing that Wright was not only the ...
This book examines the literature of African-American author Richard Wright and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, arguing that Wright was not only the foremost proponent of minoritarian protest literature, but also a groundbreaking minoritarian exponent of philosophical literature. In presenting this argument, the volume defends trolley problems from the criticism that some philosophers level against them by promoting their use as an interpretive tool for literary scholars. Starting with Martha C. Nussbaum’s interventions in literary theory concerning Henry James and perceptive...
This book examines the literature of African-American author Richard Wright and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, arguing that Wright was not only the ...