From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a m...
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist uses data, facts, and science to deliver hilarious, fascinating answers to some of the most famous questions in pop music history. “Is there life on Mars? Where have all the flowers gone? Pop songs can pose excellent questions and James Ball has given them the answers they deserve.”—The Times (UK) Some of the most famous questions of our time have come to us in pop songs. “What is love?” “How soon is now?” “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” But do yo...
This book examines the relation between the aesthetic convictions and political opinions of the Anglo-American modernists, focusing on the collaboration of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. In the years before World War I, Pound and Lewis were the forces behind the Vorticist movement, and edited the avant-garde journal "Blast". Sherry's book asks: how do we account for their simultaneous development of highly experimental forms in verse, prose, and paint, and their parallel movements in later yea...
This volume examines the concerns of Asian American literature from 1996 to the present. This period was not only marked by civil unrest, terror and militarization, economic depression, and environmental abuse, but also unprecedented growth and visibility of Asian American literature. This volume is divided into four sections that plots the trajectories of, and tensions between, social challenges and literary advances. Part One tracks how Asian American literary productions of this period reckon...
"An extensively revised and updated edition of the bestselling biography of Harper Lee, reframed from the perspective of the recent publication of Lee's Go Set a Watchman. To Kill a Mockingbird--the twentieth century's most widely read American novel--has sold thirty million copies and still sells a million yearly. In this in-depth biography, first published in 2006, Charles J. Shields brings to life the woman who gave us two of American literature's most unforgettable characters, Atticus Finch...
Richard Wright in Context (Literature in Context)
Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in Contex...
Marjorie Perloff writes in her preface to Poetics in a New Key that when she learned David Jonathan Y. Bayot wanted to publish a collection of her interviews and essays, she was "at once honored and mystified." But to Perloff's surprise and her readers' delight, the resulting assembly not only presents an accessible and provocative introduction to Perloff's critical thought, but also highlights the wide range of her interests, and the energetic reassessments and new takes that have marked her ac...
In 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson had come to a critical pass. He had lost his wife and was on the brink of leaving his career as a minister. In this reduced state he traveled to New Hampshire, where he made his famous decision to pursue wholeness--in his life and in his writing. This book reveals how Emerson went about achieving this purpose--and how he conceived a uniquely American literary practice.Central to this project were the aims and methods of natural science, which Emerson discovered in sp...
As early as the 1850s, gaslight tempted New Yorkers out into a burgeoning nightlife filled with shopping, dining, and dancing. Electricity later turned the city at night into an even more stunning spectacle of brilliantly lit streets and glittering skyscrapers. The advent of artificial lighting revolutionized the urban night, creating not only new forms of life and leisure, but also new ways of perceiving the nocturnal experience. New York Nocturne is the first book to examine how the art of the...
In the authorized historical and literary canons, women's activities as agents and writers have all traditionally been assigned to the same critical oblivion. Revising Memory resurrects a particularly dynamic moment in French history when women acted on the political stage and inscribed these often subversive actions in writing. Faith E. Beasley provides close readings of the use and conception of history in some of the primary representatives of women's literary creativity during this period:...
As the lovable and naive Synclaire James of the prime-time hit "Living Single" and as a single woman herself, Kim Coles knows what it's like to be without a man, to be with a man who's not "the one, " and to be or not to be. Now that's the question. In her first book, I'm Free, But It'll Cost You, Kim explores everything from the potentially treacherous first date to tired pick-up lines like "Got some fries to go with that shake?" Pleeease! And finally the answer to the question "Where are all t...
THE BEST OF PLAYBOAR, Thomas Hagey's 1984 incredible success has made up for the lacking sales of his first book. This "swine" parody of men's magazines swept the globe, having sold over 300,000 copies world-wide.
Romanticism was a truly European phenomenon, extending roughly from the French Revolution to the 1848 revolutions and embracing not only literature and drama but also music and visual arts. Because of Romanticism's vast scope, most treatments have restricted themselves to single countries or to specific forms, notably literature, art, or music. This book takes a wider view by considering in each of six chapters representative examples of works - from across Europe and across a range of the arts...
Fantastic Fables (Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce) (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Ambrose Bierce
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Writing, Medium, Machine (Technographies, #1)
Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies is a collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars which explores the mutual determination of forms of writing and forms of technology in modern literature. The essays unfold from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives the proposition that literature is not less but more mechanical than other forms of writing: a transfigurative ideal machine. The collection breaks new ground archaeologically, unearthing representations in literatu...