Bret Easton Ellis

Naomi Mandel is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Rhode Island, USA.

"Naomi Mandel's exceedingly well edited collection of essays on Bret Easton Ellis's three major novels—American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park—provides us with the first, long overdue, book-length account of one of the most controversial and reviled of all American authors. A brave undertaking that goes against the received wisdom of much academic and middle-brow literary criticism, this volume offers many surprising insights through close, lucid, frequently ingenious, and always astute encounters with Ellis's work. Despite—or perhaps better because of—the broad scope of approaches featured, this volume presents readers with a remarkably coherent critical conversation; no doubt to the chagrin of the author's many detractors, this collection of essays ultimately puts forth a convincing counter-canonical argument by positioning Bret Easton Ellis as one of the major American writers of the last thirty years. As such, Bret Easton Ellis proves to be not only an indispensable, and immensely teachable, resource for anyone interested in Ellis's work but also provocative for the study of contemporary literary culture in general."

• Series Preface; Introduction; Part I: American Psycho (1991); Introduction; 1. Violence, Ethics, and the Rhetoric of Decorum in American Psycho, Michael P. Clark (University of California, Irvine, USA); 2. American Psycho, Hamlet, and Existential Psychosis, Alex E. Blazer (Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, USA); 3. 'The Soul of this Man is His Clothes': Violence and Fashion in American Psycho, Elana Gomel (Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Israel); Part II: Glamorama (1999); Introduction; 4. "'It's Really Me': Intermediality and Constructed Identities in Glamorama", Sonia Baelo-Allue (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain); 5. The Unusual Suspects: Celebrity, Conspiracy, and Objective Violence in Glamorama, David Schmid (University at Buffalo, USA); 6. "Merely Political": Glam Terrorism and Celebrity Politics in Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama, Arthur Redding (York University, Toronto, Canada); Part III: Lunar Park (2005); Introduction; 7. "An awfully good impression": truth and testimony in Lunar Park, Jeff Karnicky (Drake University, Des Moines, USA); 8. What's in a name? Double exposures in Lunar Park, Henrik Skov Nielsen (Aarhus University, Denmark); 9. Brand Ellis: celebrity authorship in Lunar Park, James Annesley (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK); Further Reading; Notes on Contributors; Index.