Andrew S. Gross – författare

This book provides an in-depth analysis of representations of female murderers in modern American drama. Paying close attention to the plays’ plot, form, and style, the study seeks to come to terms with the dramatic and cultural function of this phenomenon. Given the rarity of female murder in real life, the popularity and prevalence of this theme in culture is striking and unsettling at the same time. After all, a woman who kills not only violates against basic social rules, but also upsets gender norms. This potential to break with an ideology that rests on hierarchically structured gender binaries equips the figure of the female murderer with the power to symbolically ‘kill’ established views about gender and sexuality. It is this ideologically disruptive potential that makes the female murderer a fascinating object of study, as her cultural figuration may provide information about the meaning assigned to women at a certain historical moment.

As a space of extremes, the skyscraper has been continually constructed as an urban frontier in American cultural productions. Like its counterpart of the American wilderness, this vertical frontier serves as a privileged site for both subversion and excessive control. Beyond common metaphoric readings, this study models the skyscraper not only as a Foucauldian heterotopia, but also as a complex network of human and nonhuman actors while retracing its development from its initial assemblage during the 19th century to its steady evolution into a smart structure from the mid-20th century onward. It takes a close look at US-American literary and filmic fictions and the ways in which they sought to make sense of this extraordinary structure throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. More traditional poststructuralist spatial theories are connected with concepts and methods of Actor-Network Theory in a compelling account of the skyscraper’s evolution as reflected in fictional media from early 20th-century short stories via a range of action, disaster and horror films to selected city novels of the 1990s and 2000s.

What only a few decades ago would have been considered a totalitarian nightmare seems to have become reality: Surveillance practices and technologies have infiltrated all aspects of our lives, forcing us to reconsider established notions of privacy, subjectivity, and the status of the individual in society. The United States is central to contemporary concerns about surveillance. American companies are at the forefront of developing surveillance technologies; and government agencies, in the name of security and law and order, are monitoring our words and actions more than ever before. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the implications of what many consider to be a far-reaching social, political, and cultural transformation.

This work explores portrayals of Spanish immigration to the United States (1900–1950) through six novels. It examines how Spanish immigrants navigate cultural shifts, balancing their heritage with American culture, and traces the evolution of their identities through history, language, and transculturation. Using theories of hybridization and Third Space identity, the study analyzes immigrant transformation across different periods and places. The volume includes a theoretical framework, a historical overview, and discussions of memory, language, and cultural assimilation.The volume addresses transculturality, hybridization, communication, and spatial cohabitation under the lens of logos and cultural integration, which are axes of the modern construction of individual and collective personalities. The result is original and covers diverse 20th-century Spanish-American autobiographies, creating synergies between them and enriching the study of transnational identities.(Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz, University of La Laguna)This book provides an illuminating study of the phenomenon of twentieth-century Spanish immigration to the United States, analyzing six literary texts, and delving on theoretical concepts such as transculturation or negotiating a new identity.(Juan Ignacio Guijarro González, University of Sevilla)