Mary Paniccia Carden - Böcker

The Beat Generation was a group of writers who rejected cultural standards, experimented with drugs, and celebrated sexual liberation. Starting in the 1950s with works such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the Beat Generation defined an experimental zeitgeist that endures to today. Yet left out of this picture are the Beat women, who produced a large body of writing from the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond.In Women Writers of the Beat Era, Mary Paniccia Carden gives voice to these female writers and demonstrates how their work redefines our understanding of ""Beat."" The first single-authored study on female writers of this generation, the book offers vital analysis of autobiographical works by Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, and others, introducing the reader to new voices that interact with and reconfigure the better-known narratives of the male Beat writers. In doing so, Carden demonstrates the significant role women played in this influential and dynamic literary movement.

Doubled Plots: Romance and History edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, with essays by Susan L. Blake, Stephanie Burley, Mary Paniccia Carden, Rita B. Dandridge, Janet Dean, Charles H. Hinnant, Rita Keresztesi, Huining Ouyang, Susan Strehle, and Karin E. Westman. An examination of how two diverse genres parallel and reflect each other. In art, myth, and popular culture, romance is connected with the realm of emotions, private thought, and sentimentality. History, its counterpart, is the seemingly objective compendium of public fact. In theory, the two genres are diametrically opposed, offering widely divergent views of human experience. In this collection of essays, however, the writers challenge these basic assumptions and consider the two as parallel and as reflections of each other. Looking closely at specific narratives, they argue that romance and history share expectations and purposes and create the metaphors that can either hold cultures and institutions together or drive them apart. The writers explore the internal contradictions of both genres, as seen in works in which the elements of both romance and history are present.The theme that flows throughout this collection is that romance literature and art frequently engage with or comment on actual historical events or histories. Included among the contributions are discussions of romance and race in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the Rudolph Valentino film classic The Sheik, the series of English "Regency Romance" novels, the constructs of love and history in two of Alice McDermott's novels, and a feminist reading of African American women's historical romances. Moreover, the essays approach romance and history from a variety of critical and political perspectives and examine a wide selection of romances from the 1800s to contemporary times. They look at bestsellers and literary classics, at texts by and for white audiences, and at works created by writers on the margins of Western culture. The anthology is a radical approach to romance, a genre often dismissed as diversionary and reactionary. It explores how well this genre serves for critical examinations of history. Susan Strehle is a professor of English at Binghamton University.Mary Paniccia Carden is an assistant professor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

At a moment in which America seems simultaneously more closed and more open to change than ever before, Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men: Improvising Gender, Place, Nation in American Literature re-examines a defining national discourse. Exploring the dilemmas of U.S. subjects positioned as inheritors—and thus as children—of the archetypal self-made Founder/Father, the author offers a critical re-evaluation of the trope of self-making as it is expressed in modern and contemporary American literature. She views "self-making" as a mode of simultaneous constriction and possibility, where the compulsion to perform to the national script leads to critical and creative forms of improvisation. In texts by Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, John Edgar Wideman, and others, she finds self-making re-articulated with improvisational differences that suggest possibilities for an improvisational nation.

At a moment in which America seems simultaneously more closed and more open to change than ever before, Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men: Improvising Gender, Place, Nation in American Literature re-examines a defining national discourse. Exploring the dilemmas of U.S. subjects positioned as inheritors—and thus as children—of the archetypal self-made Founder/Father, the author offers a critical re-evaluation of the trope of self-making as it is expressed in modern and contemporary American literature. She views "self-making" as a mode of simultaneous constriction and possibility, where the compulsion to perform to the national script leads to critical and creative forms of improvisation. In texts by Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, John Edgar Wideman, and others, she finds self-making re-articulated with improvisational differences that suggest possibilities for an improvisational nation.