Product Description: Poetry by Asian American writers has had a significant impact on the landscape of contemporary American poetry, and a book-length critical treatment of Asian American poetry is long overdue. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaojing Zhou demonstrates how many Asian American poets transform the conventional “I” of lyric poetry—based on the traditional Western concept of the self and the Cartesian “I”—to enact a more ethical relationship between the “I” and its others...read more

Product Description: Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island...read more

Product Description: Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies...read more

Product Description: The formation of identity has always been an intriguing property of human culture. Today, identity is largely understood as the product of discursive economies and as a vector of language use. At the center of this socio-linguistic framework lies the locus of identity production itself, the inscribed body, which represents prevailing schemes of order...read more

Product Description: This study of Lawrence's travel writings is the first book-length study to approach the subject with reference to contemporary post-colonial theory. Focusing on the writings of 1921-25, the period when Lawrence was most intensely engaged in travel, it includes chapters on Sea and Sardinia, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent and the essays and stories inspired by Lawrence's experience of the New World...read more

Product Description: By analyzing the English Romantic Era’s masculine gender norms as a set of contrasts between a heterosexual «norm» and a sodomitic «other», this book isolates four tropes that distinguish the sodomite: criminality, silence, effeminacy, and foreignness...read more

Product Description: In this innovative study, Lucille P. Fultz explores Toni Morrison's rich body of work, uncovering the interplay between differences--love and hate, masculinity and femininity, black and white, past and present, wealth and poverty--that lie at the heart of these vibrant and complex narratives...read more

Product Description: This study examines the reconstruction of identity in the context of post-totalitarian Spain and, more widely, of postmodern Western Culture. This is the first book focussing on the fiction of influential writer Cristina Fernandez Cubas...read more

Product Description: We are obsessed with "barbarians." They are the "not us," who don't speak our language, or "any language," whom we despise, fear, invade and kill; for whom we feel compassion, or admiration, and an intense sexual interest; whose innocence or vigor we aspire to, and who have an extraordinary influence on the comportment, and even modes of dress, of our civilized metropolitan lives; whom we often outdo in the barbarism we impute to them; and whose suspected resemblance to us haunts our introspections and imaginings...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot's problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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This book examines the entire corpus of Margaret Laurence’s writings from the point of view of the ambiguities and paradoxes that are an inherent feature of her work. This indeterminacy of meaning reflects the profoundly ambivalent attitude with which Laurence explored the issues dramatized in her books, foremost among which is that of individual and cultural identity. In the course of a series of close analyses of individual texts, it is argued that Laurence’s vision tends to articulate itself through what appear to be irreconcilable oppositions, but that these oppositions are subjected to processes of symbolic mediation as the writer pursues their implications. Laurence’s works can therefore best be approached dialectically, in terms of the radically different conceptions of life they simultaneously convey, and of the effort to arbitrate their conflicting claims through the act of writing itself. (view table of contents)

This volume fulfills the author's career-long reflections on radical otherness in literature. J. Hillis Miller investigates otherness through ten nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors: Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. From the exquisite close readings for which he is celebrated, Miller reaps a capacious understanding of otherness--one reachable not through theory but through literature itself. Otherness has wide valence in contemporary literary and cultural studies and is often understood as a misconception by hegemonic groups of subaltern ones. In a pleasing counter to this, Others conceives of otherness as something that inhabits sameness. Instances of the ''wholly other'' within the familiar include your sense of self or your beloved, your sense of your culture as such, or your experience of literary, theoretical, and philosophical works that belong to your own culture--works that are themselves haunted by otherness. Though Others begins and ends with chapters on theorists, the testimony they offer about otherness is not taken as more compelling than that of such literary works as Dicken's Our Mutual Friend, Conrad's ''The Secret Sharer,'' Yeats's ''Cold Heaven,'' or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Otherness, as this book finds it in the writers read, is not an abstract concept. It is an elusive feature of specific verbal constructs, different in each case. It can be glimpsed only through close readings that respect this diversity, as the plural in the title--Others--indicates. We perceive otherness in the way that the unseen--and the characters' emotional responses to it--ripples the conservative ideological surface of Howard's End. We sense it as chaos in Schlegel's radical concept of irony. And we gaze at it in the multiple personifications of Heart of Darkness. Each testifies in its own way to the richness and tangible weight of an otherness close at hand. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Early Modern Metaphysical Literature illuminates now-obscured aspects of cultural negotiation and denaturalization germane to numerous Metaphysical texts. Examining poetry and prose by Donne, Marvell, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Edward Herbert, this book challenges readers to recognize the provocative strangeness of these writings in their original contexts and today...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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