The Poetics of Insecurity

Johannes Voelz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany. In 2016, he was awarded a Heisenberg-Professorship by the German Research Foundation. He is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson's Challenge (2010) and has edited several books and special issues, among them 'Security and Liberalism' (Telos, 2015) and 'Chance, Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature' (Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2015).

'The Poetics of Insecurity is an impressive and accomplished work that analyzes a range of American narratives from the early Republic to our present moment to show how an interest in and exploration of 'security' has been central to American literature and culture. Voelz makes contributions to multiple fields, including not only American literature broadly construed, but also narrative theory; it also joins a growing body of work exploring the intersections of the literary with non-literary conceptions of security, and contributes to recent work focused on chance and/or accident in American literary history.' Steven Belletto, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania

• 1. Introduction: security and the uncertain worlds of fiction; 2. The virtue of uncertainty: securing the republic in Arthur Mervyn; 3. Harriet Jacobs's imagined community of insecurity; 4. Willa Cather and the security of radical contingency; 5. Cold War liberalism and Flannery O'Connor's 'The Displaced Person'; 6. In the future, toward death: finance capitalism and security in DeLillo's cosmopolis; Epilogue.