Eugenic Fantasies is an innovative work that combines interpretive strategies from the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literary studies to create a new model for theorizing race.

This study addresses the problem of meaning as it is conveyed by poetic language, attempting to move beyond some of the obstacles and boundaries of contemporary critical approaches. By providing a phenomenological context, and through a theoretical contemplation of certain myths as embodiments of the tacit logic of poetry, the book argues that poems convey meaning much the way that spontaneous unreadable gestures do. The poetic gesture bears a silent, inarticulate linguistic being of its own form that arises within and alongside the poem as an unreadable gesture, and that bridges with...

This work explores the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in African American writers from Charles Chesnutt in the late 19th century to Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman of the mid and late 20th century. In examining black storytelling from the frame-tale perspective, the author shows the variety of ways that these writers negotiated the intricate, both intra and extra-textual, relations set up between writer, teller, tale, listener and reader, and provides essential insights into the fundamental role of the audience in the practice of African-American...

This work investigates the ways in which World War II American artists represent new information and biomedical technologies and their effects on human identity and agency. Examining canonical authors such as Thomas Pynchon, science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler and popular filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, the author shows how these artists use the figure of the part-organic, part-technical cyborg to explore how the increasingly intimate connections between ourselves and our technologies change the contours of national, racial, sexual and labouring identities.

Through analysis of metaphors of consciousness in the philosophy and fiction of William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this work traces the significance of representations of knowledge, gender and social class, revealing how writers conceived of the self in modern literature.

This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (The Liberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and The Dial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and race. Re-examining interconnections among such superficially disparate phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, modernism and Leftist politics, this book rightly emphasizes the vitality of little magazines and argues for their necessary...

Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in 20th century literature, theory and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin likewise figures in the emergence of visual technologies positioned at the heart of the contest between surface depth and, by extension, between Western globalization and identity politics. Skin itself comes into explicit focus, though, only after a half-century of alternating circulation and suppression in American discourses about colour-blindness, during which time colonialism elsewhere had begun to lose its...

This work examines a sequence of crisis in 19th-century print culture in order to offer an original narrative of what it meant, and what it could have meant to be a Victorian novelist. Combining literary sociology and close readings, the book provides an innovative history of the material pressures and rhetorical struggles that produced, and ultimately shattered the Victorian's understanding of their great novelists.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Merchant of Modernism examines how the figure of the economic Jew symbolizes the struggle of authors from Dickens to Pound to reconcile their critique of capitalism with their own literary practices; this shifting figure parallels the development of literary modernism. Examining the historically intense ambivalence towards the economic Jew becomes a way of reconciling post-Marxist literary and cultural theory with the neo-classical synthesis of mainstream economics. This approach also provides a model for the study of ethnic hatred directed at all middleman economic groups.