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When we think of debates about pornography, what first comes to mind is the question of whether it should be banned or protected. But perhaps we should ask instead what pornography tells us about the way individuals are valued or represented. Combining literary criticism and political theory, Frances Ferguson describes the affinities between pornography and less controversial representations to provide a better understanding of its harms and to demonstrate how it works. Pornography first develop...

Salem Press' Critical Approaches to Literature series is designed to provide students and researchers with fresh insight into the various critical approaches to literary criticism. With thought-provoking analysis of several works in a wide variety of genres, each volume helps readers develop tools to analyze literary works using a particular critical lens. Volumes begin with an overview of the critical approach and guide readers on what to look for when evaluating works using that particular cr...

Anger is an emotion that affects everyone regardless of culture, class, race, or gender—but at the same time, being angry always results from the circumstances in which people find themselves. In On Anger, Sue J. Kim opens a stimulating dialogue between cognitive studies and cultural studies to argue that anger is always socially and historically constructed and complexly ideological, and that the predominant individualistic conceptions of anger are insufficient to explain its collective, struct...

Poetic Closets: Gay Lines and the New York School Poets focuses on John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler’s homosexuality and their lives in New York City. Ashbery, O’Hara, and Schuyler met because they shared their experiences—and their men—in their poems and in their lives. Rather than connecting the writings of these three New York poets with established literary movements of the past, this study offers a provocative, prosodic reading that reflects the social, intellectual, political,...

Wade was the 2009 choice for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature Author has an extensive publication record, and we can expect Small Fires to find reviews in her target audience -- journals and literary magazines Wade's essays confront her growing understanding of her sexuality and lesbian identity and should find a receptive audience among LGBT bookstores and reading groups Author is energetic and young, and can be expected to be open to online touring, book club phone calls, a...

The last two decades have seen a resurgence of critical and popular attention to Virginia Woolf's life and work. Such traditional institutions as The New York Review of Books now pair her with William Shakespeare in promotional advertisements; her face is used to sell everything from Barnes & Noble books to Bass Ale. Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings represents the first book devoted to Woolf's lesbianism. Divided into two sections, Lesbian Intersections and Lesbian Readings of Woolf's Novels, t...

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas explores the life and work of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), who emerged on the Latin American cultural scene in the 1960s and quickly achieved literary fame. Yet as a political dissident and an openly gay man, Arenas also experienced discrimination and persecution; he produced much of his work amid political controversy and precarious living conditions. In 1980, having survived ostracism and incarceration in Cuba, he arrived in the United States during th...

'Marvellous. He sends you straight back to the text, makes you feel like you're returning to an old love' GuardianWhat does it mean to be a self?Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul. In What Is the Grass keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet's life and work.What is it, then, between us? Whitma...

An examination of the perception of lesbians in American culture, this work focuses on the subversion of both stereotyped representations and some straight texts. It is divided into three principal parts - inventing the lesbian, forms of resistance, and writing in the margins.

The first collection of writings by a noted artist and activist whose work has focused on the AIDS epidemic. The HIV epidemic animates this collection of essays by a noted artist, writer, and activist. "So total was the burden of illness-mine and others'-that the only viable response, other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by using the crisis as a lens," writes Gregg Bordowitz, a film- and video-maker whose best-known works, Fast Trip Long Drop...

Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical...