An examination of self-representation in US culture. Drawing on studies of the history of the book, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, and ethnic and gender revisionism, it focuses on the processes of national development, the self-construction of authorial personae and the appropriation of the personae by interpretive communities.

Challenging previous studies that claim anxiety and antagonism between transatlantic Victorian authors, this study presents a history of transatlantic authorship that examines how three writers invented a collaborative aesthetics both within and against the dominant discourse of professionalism.

This book seeks to include among accounts of modern lyric poetry a theory of the poem's relation to the unintelligible. DeSales Harrison draws a distinction between sites of unintelligibility and sights of difficulty; while much has been said about modernist difficulty, little has been said about the attention that poets give to phenomena that arrest, impede, obscure, damage or destroy the capacity for intelligible representation.

This book examines the function of repetition in the work of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. All three poets extensively employ and comment upon the effects of repetition, yet represent three distinct poetics, considerably removed from one another in stylistic and historical terms. At the same time, the three are engaged in a highly interesting relation to each other - a relation readers tend to explain in terms of repetition, by positing Whitman and Stevens as the two alternative 'beginnings' out of which Ashbery emerges. Krystyna Mazur analyses the work of the three poets to...

Looking at a diverse series of authors--Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London--"The Colonizer Abroad" claims that as the U.S. emerged as a colonial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of the sea became a literature of imperialism. This book applies postcolonial theory to the travel writing of some of America's best-known authors, revealing the ways in which America's travel fiction and nonfiction have both reflected and shaped society.

This book analyzes the work of Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston alongside biographical materials and discourses on the body. Thomas McGlamery views each of these authors' literary output as an effort to "work through" the political meanings associated with the body, examining how they negotiate identities of class, gender, race, sexuality, and age.

Narratives of suspicion and mistrust have escaped the boundaries of specific sites of discourse to constitue a metanarrative that pervades American culture. Through close reading of texts ranging from novels (Pynchon's Vineland, Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Pierce's The Turner Diaries) to prison literature, this book examines the ways in which narratives of suspicion are both constitutive--and symptomatic--of a metanarrative that pervades American culture.

Between 1800 and the first World War, white middle-class men were depicted in all kinds of literature as weak and nervous. This book explores the cultural writings dedicated to the physical and mental health of the male subject.

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Given the welcomed shift throughout the academy away from essentialist and biologically fixed understandings of "race" and the body, it is a curiosity worth exploring that so many sophisticated-and even radical-narratives retain physical and behavioral heredity as a guiding trope. The persistence of this concept in Caribbean literature informs not only discourses on race, ethnicity, and sexuality, but also conceptions of personal and regional identity in a postcolonial societies once dominated by slavery and the plantation. In this book, Rudyard Alcocer offers a theory of Caribbean narrative,...