Innocence and Loss
A fierce outcry for war has long dominated American culture, a deadly current coursing throughout its history. This collection of essays explores how the “compulsive redeployment of innocence” in America’s wars “endlessly defers a national reckoning.”
Thy Truth Then Be Thy Dowry
This collection of essays offers new insights into inheritance in American women’s writing. Contributors examine women’s problematic relationship to their legacy, revealing strategies of resistance and empowerment used to cope with the burden or lack of inheritance.
Displaced Women
These interdisciplinary essays explore women’s narratives of displacement, transcending the idea of ‘national identity’. The contributors compel us to rethink ‘mother tongue’ and linguistic ownership, and ask how women express their ‘permanent strangeness’.
Fabricating the Body
Fabricating the Body draws on disability, gender, and psychoanalytic studies to situate the body as a site of identity, obligation, and exchange. It stimulates conversation on “indebted” bodies, marginalization, and the ethical costs of societal progress.
This book deconstructs the ‘otherizing’ of the marginalized by offering an alternative reading of the body and desire. It investigates bodies with ‘unnatural’ desires to expose and subvert the subtle political ideologies behind stereotypes.
This collection of essays challenges French-centered conceptions of francophonie. It proposes a pluricentric view, reading cultural forms from the Caribbean, Africa, and Quebec as products of their own contexts, revealing a Frenchness that is truly plural.
Facing the Crises
This collection of essays explores “crisis” in Anglo-American literature and culture. It analyzes our relationship to technology and the virtual, rethinks literary genres, and shows why humanist research is crucial for understanding the human condition.
This book analyzes madness in masterpieces of 19th and 20th-century Spanish literature. It explores how conceptions of madness intersect with love, religion, and politics in works by writers like Galdós, Unamuno, Pardo Bazán, and others.
Imagining the Mexican Revolution
In this original collection of essays, leading Mexicanists evaluate the cultural legacy of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution. These cutting-edge essays examine the literary and visual representations of this landmark event and the complexity of its aftermath.
Popular Appeal
In a world of urgent social change, young people are devouring fiction about identity and transition. This book examines how popular genres are being redefined to explore today’s key questions about the environment, identity, and our place in a fragile world.
Legilimens!
Legilimens is the spell to see into another’s mind. This collection brings together anthropologists, theologians, historians, and rhetoricians to see into the Harry Potter texts, deliberating over the greater scholarly significance of these rich works.
Southern Horrors
This book explores the Mediterranean’s dark side through the eyes of Northern Europeans. Over four centuries, travellers saw not a sun-drenched ideal, but a world of cruelty, poverty, and superstition, telling us more about their own prejudices than the South.
This collection explores risk-taking as agency in women’s autobiographical narratives in French. Essays discuss courage, resilience, and freedom, examining how women challenge conventions and overcome obstacles to ameliorate their lives.
Grotesque Revisited
This collection of essays explores the grotesque in modern Central and Eastern European writing, focusing on the Soviet era. Scholars analyze the relationship between the socio-political background and subversive literary representations of the grotesque.
Social Jane
Christopher Wilkes reveals the sociologist in Jane Austen. Exploring landscape, economics, and fashion, he argues that Austen was a brilliant analyst of the complex social hierarchies of her time.
Retold Stories, Untold Histories
This text explores how Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko challenge official history. Coming from marginalized groups, both writers use creative writing to reconstruct silenced pasts and counter stereotypical narratives of American identity.
Black Writers and the Left examines the fraught relationship between African American intellectuals and the leftist movement in the early twentieth century, featuring unpublished interviews and archival research on figures like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
This volume investigates cultural representations of American minorities and women. Through analysis of film and literature, it explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and the complex relationship between the dominant and the marginalized.
At Whom Are We Laughing?
At whom are we really laughing? This collection of scholarly papers explores humor across the centuries in the literatures of Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula, revealing diverse aspects of wit little known to the general reader.
This study analyzes Margaret Laurence’s work as an entity, exploring representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Covering her fiction and non-fiction, it gives voice to the marginal to challenge readers’ perceptions.