Heike Schaefer - Böcker

Best known for The Land of Little Rain, a collection of natural-history essays about the California deserts, the Western writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) was a prolific literary figure in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In addition to her essays and short stories, Austin produced novels, poems, and cultural criticism, and was well known as a feminist, political writer, and mystic. Over the past decade a number of Austin's books have been reissued and her work has been the subject of increasing critical attention. Heike Schaefer's study complements that renewed interest with a fresh, broad appreciation of the complexity of Austin's work. Considering unpublished materials and the full range of Austin's literary and theoretical writing, Mary Austin's Regionalism presents Austin as a significant early twentieth-century author who reworked the traditions of nature writing and women's regionalism to envision a sustainable and democratic American culture. Austin brought an environmental awareness to the exploration of the race, gender, and class dynamics informing the European American colonization of the West.

The search for immediacy, the desire to feel directly connected to people or events, has been a driving force in American literature and media culture for the past two centuries. This book offers the first in-depth study of literary immediacy effects. It shows how the heightened reality effects of photography, film, and television inspired American writers to create new literary forms that would enhance their readers' sense of immediate participation in the world. The study combines close readings of Emerson, Whitman, Stein, Dos Passos, Coover, Foster Wallace, and DeLillo with detailed considerations of visual media to open up a new perspective on literary innovation and the ongoing cultural quest for increased immediacy. It argues that we can better understand how American literature develops when we consider experiments with literary form not only in literary and cultural contexts but also in relation to the emergence of new media, their immediacy effects, and the larger changes in social life that they manifest and provoke.

The search for immediacy, the desire to feel directly connected to people or events, has been a driving force in American literature and media culture for the past two centuries. This book offers the first in-depth study of literary immediacy effects. It shows how the heightened reality effects of photography, film, and television inspired American writers to create new literary forms that would enhance their readers' sense of immediate participation in the world. The study combines close readings of Emerson, Whitman, Stein, Dos Passos, Coover, Foster Wallace, and DeLillo with detailed considerations of visual media to open up a new perspective on literary innovation and the ongoing cultural quest for increased immediacy. It argues that we can better understand how American literature develops when we consider experiments with literary form not only in literary and cultural contexts but also in relation to the emergence of new media, their immediacy effects, and the larger changes in social life that they manifest and provoke.

Situated at the crossroads of American studies, literary studies, book studies, and media studies, these essays show that a sustained focus on the medial and material formats of literary communication significantly expands our accustomed ways of doing cultural studies.