Contributions to English and American Literary Studies (CEALS) – serie

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.

This volume sheds light on the nexus between knowledge and literature. Arranged historically, contributions address both popular and canonical English and US-American writing from the early modern period to the present. They focus on how historically specific texts engage with epistemological questions in relation to material and social forms as well as representation. The authors discuss literature as a culturally embedded form of knowledge production in its own right, which deploys narrative and poetic means of exploration to establish an independent and sometimes dissident archive. The worlds that imaginary texts project are shown to open up alternative perspectives to be reckoned with in the academic articulation and public discussion of issues in economics and the sciences, identity formation and wellbeing, legal rationale and political decision-making.

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.

Assessing the cultural history of the dandy as a figure traditionally gendered masculine, this wide-ranging study advances a critical space for the discussion of the woman dandy. Modernist Women Dandies revisits dandyism to provide an interpretative framework for re-evaluating the literary careers of women authors with atypical literary presence: Edith Sitwell, Nancy Cunard, and Mina Loy. Cutting across media boundaries, it demonstrates how their experimental poetry and portrait photographs feed into each other, fabricating dandy authorial performances that are simultaneously unapologetically feminine and queer. In showing how these authors redefined the interplay between dandyism and authorship, this book makes an important contribution to rethinking modernist literary culture.

This book is committed to women as writers and storytellers; all the selected novels are female-centric in that the main characters are women.　The authors, also women, are from three diverse American ethnic groups from both the North and South. Through a close reading of several novels, Babakhani shows how the reinvention of cultural traditions serves these women writers as a political, decolonial, and feminist tool. Babakhani situates her readings in a critique of the concepts of realism and magical realism. 　Because magical realism sets realism against magic and implies binary oppositions, Babakhani proposes "cultural realism" as a revisionary concept that takes the cultural importance of rituals and beliefs seriously, without simply dismissing them as superstition.

This volume explores the relationship between democracy, secrecy, and transparency in contemporary English literature. It focuses on how fiction engages with the tension between secrecy and disclosure, central to debates about freedom in information societies. Drawing on theorists like Derrida, Birchall, Horn, and Han, among others, the essays examine secrecy as a form of resistance against hegemonic transparency, framing it as a political act of dissent. Scholars on Secrecy Studies argue that secrecy challenges dominant ideologies and creates space for contestation, rather than aligning with oppressive systems. Literature is positioned as an ideal realm to articulate these ideas, showcasing how secrecy functions both thematically and formally. On one level, literature reflects dissidence, freedom of expression, and censorship; on another, it underscores the impossibility of full disclosure, with texts retaining interpretive openness. This collection analyzes how secrecy operates as a structuring device, shaping narrative form, and explores its connections to resistance, democracy, and transparency in cultural and political contexts.The chapter “Posthumanism, Secrecy, and Transparency: From Jennifer Egan's ‘Black Box’ (2012) to ‘Lulu the Spy, 2032’ in The Candy House” by Sonia Baelo-Allué is a Gold Open Access chapter with a CC-BY 4.0 licence. It can be downloaded here.