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Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolano offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author's first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American...

Poems of the American Empire argues that careful attention to a particular strain of twentieth-century lyric poetry yields a counter-history of American global power. The period that Phillis covers-from Ezra Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 to Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire in 2012-roughly matches what some consider the ascent and decline of the American empire. The diverse poems that appear in this book are united by their use of epic forms in the lyric poem, a combination that violates a...

Ethnic Positioning in Southwestern Mixed Heritage Writing presents how Southwestern writers and visual artists provide an opportunity to turn a stigmatized identity into a self-conscious holder of valuable assets, cultural attitudes, and memories. The problem of mixed ethno-cultural heritage is a relevant feature of North American population, and millions face similar challenges. Narratives on blended heritage show how mixed-race authors utilize their multiple ethnic experiences, knowledge archi...

Monolingual, monolithic English is an issue of the past. In this collection, by using cinema, poetry, art, and novels we demonstrate that English has become the heteroglossic language of immigration - Englishes of exile. By appropriating its plural form we pay respect to all those who have been improving standard English, thus proving that one may be born in a language as well as give birth to a language or add to it one's own version. The story of the immigrant, refugee, exile, expatriate is ev...

Since its publication in 1936, Gone with the Wind has held a unique position in American cultural memory, both for its particular vision of the American South in the age of the Civil War and for its often controversial portrayals of race, gender, and class. New Approaches to ""Gone with the Wind"" offers neither apology nor rehabilitation for the novel and its Oscar-winning film adaptation. Instead, the nine essays provide distinct, compelling insights that challenge and complicate conventional...

In The News and Other Poems, David Citino confronts and attempts to make sense of the news. He explores the good and bad ways the world has of careening into a life and sending it off course. Citino tries to understand how we come to know what we know, driven as we are by haughty assumptions about the world we’re making and the control we think we exert over our own lives and loves. While still holding romantic notions of ivory towers and ivy-covered garrets, Citino welcomes the latest informati...

Over the past generation the Deep South has become the primary focus, and the plantation the predominant site, in southern literary studies. These developments followed academic interest first in postcolonial studies and more recently in globalization studies and conceptions of the Global South. With The North of the South Barbara Ladd turns her attention to the Upper South, exploring the fluidity of regional boundaries in this part of the world. In so doing she argues for greater attention to...

In 1924 DuBose Heyward (1885-1940) was a businessman absorbed in his Charleston heritage. One year later he was the world-famous author of Porgy, the first major southern novel to portray blacks without condescension. Just a decade later George Gershwin had transformed Heyward's book into an opera that would become one of the most enduring masterworks of American music.As a young man Heyward was immersed in the Gullah culture of his city. Especially through his mother, a performer and interprete...

In the House of Blue Lights is an award-winning collection of short stories by Susan Neville. The house referred to in the title is a specific place in midwestern folklore, but the blue also refers to the blue of the globe as seen from space and the blue lights that flicker behind closed eyelids in the house of the imagination."It was January when he brought her here. She had accepted that on the maps of the world there were these green and brown places called continents floating in the cradle o...

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction-from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!-to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and cinema, along with the tra...

What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with particular sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale's genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions have been broached by ecocritics concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature, and by theologians c...

No other novel by William Faulkner has experienced the kind of dramatic critical re-evaluation that Sanctuary has received. Published in 1931, it seemed to many readers and critics in the thirties as a terrible misstep on Faulkner's part. It was a violent, vulgar, deliberately sensational work. Over the years, serious Faulkner critics have attempted to go beyond the initial shock of this nightmarish tale and to place it within the context of Faulkner's overall achievement. This volume offers a c...

Killing the Indian Maiden examines the fascinating and often disturbing portrayal of Native American women in film. Through discussion of thirty-four Hollywood films from the silent period to the present, M. Elise Marubbio examines the sacrificial role of what she terms the "Celluloid Maiden" -- a young Native woman who allies herself with a white male hero and dies as a result of that choice. Marubbio intertwines theories of colonization, gender, race, and film studies to ground her study in so...

William Faulkner's first ventures into print culture began far from the world of highbrow New York publishing houses such as Boni & Liveright or Random House and little magazines such as the Double-Dealer. With that diverse publishing history in mind, this collection explores Faulkner's multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, with the United States and international print cultures of his era, along with how these cultures have mediated his relationship with various twentieth- and twenty-...

Future History traces the ways that English and American writers oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the intertwined identities of America, other English colonial sites and metropolitan England during a period before...