This work examines global cities as a literary phenomenon, the "DiverCity," based on the reading of selected North American novels. By analyzing Dionne Brand's Toronto in What We All Long For, Chang-rae Lee's New York in Native Speaker, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Los Angeles in Tropic of Orange, Melanie U. Pooch provides the connecting link for exploring the triad of globalization and its effects, global cities as cultural nodal points, and cultural diversity in a globalizing age as a literary phenomenon.

Houses, Secrets, and the Closet investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in 18th- and 19th-century fiction. It focuses on close readings of Gothic and sensation novels, as well as tales by Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. In this way, the book investigates the cultural roots of the closet - the male homosexual secret - which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society.

This book focuses on the pivotal role which space and spatiality assume in the plot and narrative discourse of contemporary American literary narratives. Embarking from a new, spatialized approach to cultural history and particularly narrative theory that might also prove useful for neighboring philologies, Marcel Thoene hypothesizes that the canon of novels selected represents a dialectic of simultaneous affirmation and subversion of the American myth of space. This brings about an integrative and emancipatory function of space, reflecting the current dynamic toward a more transcultural,...

Writings on the metropolis generally foreground illimitability, stressing thereby that the urban ultimately remains both illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to demonstrate that mentality as a tool offers orientation in the urban realm. Nora Pleke develops a model of urban mentality to be employed for cities worldwide. Against the background of the Spatial Turn, she identifies dominant urban-specific structures of London mentality in contemporary London novels, such as Monica Ali's Brick Lane, J.G. Ballard's Millennium People,...

Pearl S. Buck's engagement with (neo-)missionary cultures in the United States and China is a central element of her work. Against the backdrop of her missionary upbringing, the Nobel Prize winner Buck developed a fictional project which both revised and reaffirmed American foreign missionary activity in the Pacific Rim during the 20th century. Vanessa Kunnemann traces this aspect of the career of America's number one expert on China--as Buck came to be known--from a variety of disciplinary angles, including Middlebrow Studies and New American Studies.

Beyond the Civil War Hospital argues that Reconstruction was a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's "mental adaptation process," Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the "heart and the brain" only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's individual adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The...

Gerrit Haas re-theorizes the peculiar textual conduct of ficto/critical writing, which inextricably intersects fictional with critical discourses as well as aesthetics with poetics and ethics. The slash here signals the conjunction between a self-reflexive ficto-critical insight and a wider discursive ficto-critical motivation. In its refined form, this twofold trope shifts perspective from the prevalent generic between onto the meta-generic level of our textual practices. Ultimately, the ficto/critical is thus qualified as an unheard-of interventionist aesthetic of...

After a long period of neglect, emotions have become an important topic within literary studies. This collection of essays stresses the complex link between aesthetic and non-aesthetic emotional components. Against this background, emotional patterns are discussed by focusing on the practice of writing as well as on the impact of emotional patterns on receptive processes. Readers will be confronted with a concept of aesthetic emotions as formative within both the writing and the reading processes. Essays ranging in subject from the beginning of modern drama to digital formats and theoretical...

On Contemporary JewishAmerican Literature.