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Product Description: "In everyday speech, "community" signals intimate, authentic, and deeply egalitarian social relations. Since the 1960s, "community" also often implies political solidarity. Yet, repression and violence clearly operate within communities as well as between them...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study attempts to bring together a series of provinces between and within contemporary theory, criticism and fiction. It provides an overview of some of the most complex issues shaping present literary debates with a clear focus on Canadian fiction of the last 20 years of the 20th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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

Product Description: Examines the notion of exile and hybrid cultural identity in Proust, Joyce, and Baldwin, with implications for our understanding of modernism and the modernist canon. Reading on the Edge explores the notion of multiple cultural identity and exile in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and James Baldwin...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The first collection to articulate the pedagogical strategies of using detective fiction to investigate the politics of difference. The volume examines the many ways in which diversity is posited by contemporary writers exploring distinctive American subcultures. The distinguishing characteristic of the book is its mix of essays focusing on teaching cultural diversity in the classroom and illustrating diversity through fiction to the general reader.    Among the issues addressed are definitions of diversity; what constitutes ethnicity or race, especially in terms of multiple subjectivities; how race, gender, and ethnicity are culturally constructed; and what part is played by identity politics. (view table of contents)

Frank O’Hara’s poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the fifties and early sixties. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism and race riots. Hazel Smith suggests that the location and dislocation of the cityscape creates "hyperscapes" in the poetry of Frank O’Hara. The hyperscape is a postmodern site characterized by difference, breaking down unified concepts of text, city, subject and art, and remolding them into new textual, subjective and political spaces. This book theorizes the process of disruption and re-figuration which constitutes the hyperscape, and celebrates its radicality. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Postcolonial theory is a relatively new area in critical contemporary studies, having its foundations in the study of colonial discourse, neo-colonialism and Commonwealth literature. This reader contains 13 essays focusing on colonial discourse, covering such topics as the decolonization of African literature; literary studies and British rule in India; literature of modern Europe; language of class; and the ideologies of immigration...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The book not only confirms the high ethical stakes in informed contemporary reading; it offers a rare readerly pleasure in... exploring the wider cultural significance of gender and the body and their narrative representation." ―Henry Sussman, SUNY-BuffaloGabriele Schwab revitalizes debates about literature’s cultural function by exploring literary experience as an encounter with otherness...read more

Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni’s Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture.Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature.Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young

Product Description: In a culture where passivity and receptivity are stereotypically deemed "feminine" traits, while authority and power are typically associated with maleness, the idea of poetic inspiration--which invests an individual with authority through the act of reception--sets up a conflict between traditional gender roles...read more

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Product Description: The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period. In her dozen novels she has explored themes as diverse as biligualism (as a metaphor for alienation) and the influence of computer technology on the humanities...read more

Product Description: Yeats' desire for "Unity of Being" was driven by the sense of difference and division he took from his divided Anglo-Irish identity. Yeats' speakers -- his "masks" -- express different and sometimes conflicting viewpoints, while their assertiveness seeks to deny uncertainty...read more

Product Description: Fully conversant with the critical issues of the current cultural debates, Djelal Kadir goes to great pains to articulate and exercise the scruples with which critical reading and cultured scrutiny might proceed without unduly compromising otherness or capitulating the congeniality of reading and writing as civilizing activities...read more

Product Description: Fully conversant with the critical issues of the current cultural debates, Djelal Kadir goes to great pains to articulate and exercise the scruples with which critical reading and cultured scrutiny might proceed without unduly compromising otherness or capitulating the congeniality of reading and writing as civilizing activities...read more

Product Description: Ring Lardner and the Other is actually two books, mutually embedded. The first is about Ring Lardner: a long reading of a single Lardner short story, "Who Dealt?", a briefer look at his life and work, and an exploration of his reception...read more

Product Description: Book by McGee, Patrick

Product Description: Inscribing the Other focuses on great authors who have by birth or choice (or both) found themselves outside the mainstream of their culture but who have still wished to address it: Goethe, Freud, Wilde, Heine, Nietzsche, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others...read more