Product Description: A disturbing but ultimately discredited strain in American thought, eugenics was a crucial ideological force in the early twentieth century. Luczak investigates the work of writers like Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to consider the impact of eugenic racial discourse on American literary production from 1900-1940...read more

Product Description: WINNER, 2017 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award  Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Awards    Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for thefirst time became the popular literary representatives of what it meantto be a soldier and what it meant to be an American...read more

The History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present offers a comprehensive analysis of the wide range of literary works that extends into the 21st century Covers drama, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, science fiction, and detective novels Features discussion of American works within the context of such 21st-century issues as globalization, medicine, gender, education, and other topics

Product Description: Examines a range of fiction that challenges widespread assumptions about what it means to be a black person of faith. Taking up the perceived tensions between the LGBTQ community and religious African Americans, Marlon Rachquel Moore examines how strategies of antihomophobic resistance dovetail into broader literary and cultural concerns...read more

Product Description: Explores how the trope of racial passing continues to serve as a touchstone for gauging public beliefs and anxieties about race in this multiracial era. The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century...read more

Product Description: Postmodern Plagiarisms investigates literary plagiarism and how it serves as a strategic act in several postmodern US-American texts. The book discusses the strong link between author and text at the interface between economics, law, and literary theory, and the complex process of its subversive violation...read more

Product Description: Luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Arna Bontemps, among others--are associated with, well . . . Harlem. But the story of these New York writers unexpectedly extends to the American West...read more

Product Description: Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, preeminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Neibuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it...read more

Product Description: Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature explores the ways in which 20th-century literature has been influenced by Buddhism, and has been, in turn, a major factor in bringing about Buddhism's increasing spread and influence in the West...read more

Product Description: A study of race and sexuality and their interdependencies in American literature from 1945 to 1955, Desegregating Desire examines the varied strategies used by eight American poets and novelists to integrate sexuality into their respective depictions of desegregated places and emergent identities in the aftermath of World War II...read more

The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significant traditions, genres, and themes of civil rights literature. While civil rights scholarship has typically focused on documentary rather than creative writing, and political rather than cultural history, this Companion addresses the gap and provides university students with a vast introduction to an impressive range of authors, including Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison. Accessible to undergraduates and academics alike, this Companion surveys the critical landscape of a rapidly-growing field and lays the foundation for future studies.

Product Description: Since 1900, the average life expectancy in the developed world has almost doubled, from 45 to 80. "We are almost a new species," declared the English writer V.S. Pritchett, while pointing out that this means "most of us have to face the prospect of a long old age before we die...read more

Product Description: With a new and more inclusive perspective for the growing field of queer Native studies, Lisa Tatonetti provides a genealogy of queer Native writing after Stonewall. Looking across a broad range of literature, Tatonetti offers the first overview and guide to queer Native literature from its rise in the 1970s to the present day...read more

Product Description: Although a handful of books and articles have been written about American literary Minimalism during the last forty years, the mode remains misunderstood. When in a 2011 interview in The Paris Review author Ann Beattie was asked how she felt about being “classed as a minimalist,” she began her answer: “none of us have ever known what that means...read more

Product Description: The post–Civil Rights era was marked by an explosion of black political thought and aesthetics. Reflecting a shifting horizon of expectations around race relations, the unconventional sounds of free jazz coupled with experimental literary creation nuanced the push toward racial equality and enriched the possibilities for aesthetic innovation within the Black Arts Movement...read more

The story and history of the Beats couldn't be found in the traditional libraries or archives of academic research. For preeminent historian of Beat culture John Tytell, it had to be found in the bars, towns, roads, and hangouts of these writers and figures. And as Writing Beat demonstrates, the same techniques apply to new and future writers.Approaching the history of postwar twentieth-century American literature, and in particular the Beat literary movement of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others, Tytell finds himself uniquely positioned as an eyewitness to many of these stories. In this book, he shares his insight with the reader. As he interviewed, drank, traveled, and survived countless moments with some of these literary legends, Tytell discovered much about the craft of nonfiction and biography, and the nature of history. Writing Beat demonstrates, through Tytell's growth as a professor and historian of the Beats, lessons learned and hazards encountered for those aspiring to become writers themselves.As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Writing Beat reminds us writers do not spring to life fully formed, and the struggle to get to literature can be a blast.

Product Description: Emergent U.S. Literatures introduces readers to the foundational writers and texts produced by four literary traditions associated with late-twentieth-century US multiculturalism. Examining writing by Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and gay and lesbian Americans after 1968, Cyrus R...read more