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"American fiction-20th century-History and criticism"
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Writing against reform : aesthetic realism in the Progressive Era
Throughout the Progressive Era, reform literature became a central feature of the American literary landscape. Works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's \"The Yellow Wall-Paper,\" and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives topped bestseller lists and jolted middle-class readers into action. While realism and social reform have a long-established relationship, prominent writers of the period such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Kate Chopin resisted explicit political rhetoric in their own works and critiqued reform aesthetics, which too often rang hollow. Arielle Zibrak reveals that while these writers were often seen as indifferent to the political currents of their time, their work is a part of a little explored debate on the relationship between literature and politics at the heart of Progressive Era publishing. Examining the critique of reform aesthetics within the tradition of American realist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Writing Against Reform promises to change the way we think about the fiction of this period and many of America's leading writers.
eBook
Sleep Fictions
The literary response to the dawning cult of wakefulness A turn-of-the-century influx of new technologies and the enormous impact of the electric light transformed not only individual sleeping habits but the ways American culture conceived and valued sleep. Hannah L. Huber analyzes the works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to examine the literary response to the period's obsession with wakefulness. As these writers blurred the separation of public and private space, their characters faced exhaustion in a modern world that permeated every moment of their lives with artificial light, traffic noise, and the social pressure to remain active at all hours. The implacable cultural clock and constant stress over physical limitations had an even greater impact on marginalized figures. Huber pays particular attention to how these writers rebutted Americans' confidence in the body's ability to conquer sleep with vivid portraits of the devastating consequences of sleep disruption and deprivation. The author also provides a website and text visualization tool that offers readers an interdisciplinary, deconstructed analysis of the book's primary texts. The website can be found at: https://sleepfictions.org/sleep/scalar/index [https://sleepfictions.org/sleep/scalar/index]
eBook
Finance Fictions
A powerful reading of a mode of popular fiction made especially salient in an age of increasing financialization.Argues that contemporary realism has been shaped by the increasing abstraction by which neoliberal finance has come to rewrite what counts as real.
Building on both established and emerging discussions of literature and finance,Finance Fictionstakes the measure of the tension between psychosis and realism in the contemporary finance novel. Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe'sBonfire of the Vanitiesand Bret Easton Ellis'sAmerican Psycho, this book considers that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of finance novel that in the face of an ongoing economic crisis, ever more frequent market crashes, and the politics of austerity, pursues a more realist approach to the actual workings of the economy.
But what kind of realism would be attuned to today's economic reality of high-frequency trading, dominated by complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record? If Tom Wolfe in 1989 could still urge novelists to work harder to \"tame the billion-footed beast of reality\", it seems today's economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing.
Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close-reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons' Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy-an \"if\" whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry,Finance Fictionsseeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.
Features readings of popular novels, such as Tom Wolfe's \"Bonfire of the Vanities\" and Bret Easton Ellis' \"American Psycho,\" as well as more recent works by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, and others.
eBook
American Modernist Fiction
American Modernist Fiction: Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity addresses five American Modernist novels in light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Kay Boyle's Process, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Thornton Wilder's The Cabala, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Dolis's dynamic readings constitute a spirited \"performance\" of the narrative, deploying his own innovative form of literary analysis, what he calls \"performance criticism\". These psychoanalytic studies simultaneously stage the narrative and re-enact its putative significance, provoke and question its intent, thereby establishing a dialectics of desire—what both affects the body of the narrative and, equally, the critic's subjectivity.
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Reading the American novel 1865-1914
\"An indispensable tool for teachers and students of American literature, Reading the American Novel 1865-1914 provides a comprehensive introduction to the American novel in the post-civil war period. Locates American novels and stories within a specific historical and literary context Offers fresh analyses of key selected literary works Addresses a wide audience of academics and non-academics in clear, accessible prose Demonstrates the changing mentality of 19th-century America entering the 20th century Explores the relationship between the intellectual and artistic output of the time and the turbulent socio-political context\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Angry planet : decolonial fiction and the American Third World
Before the idea of the Anthropocene, there was the angry planet How might we understand an earthquake as a complaint, or erosion as a form of protest-in short, the Earth as an angry planet? Many novels from the end of the millennium did just that, centering around an Earth that acts, moves, shapes human affairs, and creates dramatic, nonanthropogenic change. In Angry Planet, Anne Stewart uses this literature to develop a theoretical framework for reading with and through planetary motion. Typified by authors like Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose work anticipates contemporary critical concepts of entanglement, withdrawal, delinking, and resurgence, angry planet fiction coalesced in the 1990s and delineated the contours of a decolonial ontology. Stewart shows how this fiction brought Black and Indigenous thought into conversation, offering a fresh account of globalization in the 1990s from the perspective of the American Third World, construing it as the era that first made connections among environmental crises and antiracist and decolonial struggles. By synthesizing these major intersections of thought production in the final decades of the twentieth century, Stewart offers a recent history of dissent to the young movements of the twenty-first century. As she reveals, this knowledge is crucial to incipient struggles of our contemporary era, as our political imaginaries grapple with the major challenges of white nationalism and climate change denial.
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