Product Description: Everyone Got marrIed In the 1950s, then moved to the suburbs to have the children of the soon-to-be-famous baby boom. For Americans who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, prosperous married life was a triumph. The unwed were objects of pity, scorn, even suspicion...read more

Product Description: Little America is for anyone who has ever considered just getting in the car and driving away. Here the ribbon of Western road is a metaphor for the heart’s strange longings, providing hard, sometimes hilarious, lessons on the improbability of escape, the possibility of salvation, and the elusiveness of self-knowledge...read more

Widely read in the age of British imperialism and still popular today, the five writers studied here have allowed millions to participate vicariously in the imperial project. Yet all of these writers, so instrumental in popularizing the imperial agenda of power and dominance, bore deep emotional scars and as adults bolstered their fragile psychic states through fantasies of empire. While soldiers and politicians may know to bury or at least camouflage their fears and desires, inner fantasy is the necessary ingredient of literature, and popular fiction often offers the opportunity to probe the mind of an age. … The connection between childhood loss and the desire for imperial escape, power and dominance is illuminated by De Quincey’s mad screeds against the Chinese as both terrifyingly powerful and laughably weak, while Stevenson’s romances, though written from an invalid’s bed, are credited with “selling” the idea of empire as manly adventure. Conan Doyle’s tales of a Britain menaced at home by imperial blowback are models of Great Power paranoia that resonate today, and Kipling’s stories of imperial Britain grow increasingly grandiose as childhood’s psychic wounds are re-opened. Finally, Dinesen portrays plantation life in British East Africa as a gentle romance in which displaced African “squatters” serve as loyal and adoring retainers, providing the aristocratic aura for which the author yearns. It is sometimes said that, “Love’s loss is empire’s gain,” and for these writers, Simmons shows, empire presented a magnificent opportunity to compensate for childhood calamity.

A critical and biographical analysis of the works of Maxine Hong Kingston explores her writing in the context of Chinese and Chinese American experience

Product Description: Book by Simmons, Diane

A critical examinination of the works of Jamaica Kincaid reveals the influence of colonial domination in the West Indies, where she was born, and racial domination in the United States, to which she migrated as a teenager