Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature – Serie

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as "women" was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of "America." "America," their responses prove, is a transnational construct.

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects.The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

Richard Wright and Transnationalism sees Dr. Mamoun Alzoubi argue that renowned American Author, Richard Wright, transformed the way that we approach comparative literature by beginning to look at matters of American racism and Civil Rights in transnational contexts, formed by the new nations surfacing from colonial rule. Richard Wright and Transnationalism demonstrates how Wright, beginning with his work in the 1950s, began to hypothesize the shared history of suffering that linked the experience of slavery, Jim Crow and racism in African American life with the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the large communities of Africa, Asia and Europe.

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

This volume examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating this ancient virtue at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring the relationship among the intersecting themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the United States, the book concentrates on the ways the US administers protocols of belonging and non-belonging, and distinguishes between those who can feel at home from those who will always be outside the body politic, even if they were the original "hosts." The volume opens with a genealogy of hospitality through a focus on its sites, from its origins in the Bible, to its national and post-national renditions in contemporary American literature and culture. The authors explore recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in Spielberg’s The Terminal and Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, to the different ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the United States in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Karen T. Yamashita’s I Hotel, Junot Díaz’s "Invierno," and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Chango’s Fire, concluding with the spectrality of the immigrant body in George Saunders’ "The Semplica Girl Diaries." Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to specialists in post-colonialism; American Studies; immigration, diaspora, and border studies; and critical race and gender studies for its innovative approaches to media and literary texts.

Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century political liberation movements, the New Woman represents a site of cultural and socio-political contestation and acts as a marker of modernity. This book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK, Canada, North America, Europe, and Japan. The key concept of 'hybridities' is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the 'modern woman' as well as to locate this figure both within international consumer culture and within feminist writing. The book is structured around four key themes. 'Hybridities' examines the instabilities of New Woman identities and discourses in relation to both national/ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. 'Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass' is concerned with the periodical press and its production and circulation of New Woman images. 'Feminist Counter Cultures?' interrogates feminist efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation of New Woman subjectivities. 'Race and the New Woman' inspects white New Women's investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the way in which black and non-Western women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women's Studies, and Women's History.

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo's writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns for the fist time.Providing a lucid and nuanced reading of DeLillo's ambivalent engagement with American and European culture, as well as with modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and terrorism, this fascinating volume interrogates the critical and aesthetic capacities of fiction in what is an age of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism.

This work expands the scope of Morrison’s project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author’s specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization’s primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing from the very Heart of Africa. Despite the weight of "white" authority and the disparaging of "blackness," Beloved’s multiple "ghosts" conjure up a legacy so potent that no authoritarian discourse has been able to entirely erase it, a legacy that still speaks to us from a heritage we no longer acknowledge yet that nevertheless remains, and sustains us.

This book is a significant contribution to existing research on the themes of race and slavery in the founding literature of the United States. It extends the boundaries of existing research by locating race and slavery within a transnational and 'oceanic' framework.The author applies critical concepts developed within postcolonial theory to American texts written between the national emergence of the United States and the Civil War, in order to uncover metaphors of the colonial and imperial 'unconscious' in America's foundational writing. The book analyses the writings of canonized authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville alongside those of lesser known writers like Olaudah Equiano, Royall Tyler, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Maxwell Philip, and situates them within the colonial, and 'postcolonial', context of the slave-based economic system of the Black Atlantic.While placing the transatlantic slave trade on the map of American Studies and viewing it in conjunction with American imperial ambitions in the Pacific, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature also adds a historical dimension to present discussions about the 'ambivalence' of postcoloniality.

Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historiographic and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.

The last ten years have witnessed an enormous growth in American interest in Asia and Asian/American history. In particular, a set of key Asian historical moments have recently become the subject of intense American cultural scrutiny, namely China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; the Korean American war and its legacy; the era of Japanese geisha culture and its subsequent decline; and China’s one-child policy and the rise of transracial, international adoption in its wake. Grice examines and accounts for this cultural and literary preoccupation, exploring the corresponding historical-political situations that have both circumscribed and enabled greater cultural and political contact between Asia and America.

Native American Literature underwent a Renaissance around 1968, and the current canon of novels written in the late twentieth century in American English by Native American or mixed-blood authors is diverse, exciting and flourishing. Despite this, very few such novels are accepted as part of the broader American literary canon.This book offers a valuable and original approach to contemporary Native American literature. Dennis’s contemplation of space and spatialized aesthetics is compelling and persuasive. Considering Native American literature within a modernist framework, and comparing it with writers such as Woolf, Stein, T.S Eliot and Proust results in a valuable and enriching context for the selected texts. Vital reading for scholars of Native American Literature, this book will also provide good grounding in the subject for those with an interest in American and twentieth century literature more generally.

This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author’s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov’s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov’s major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov’s attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov’s heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov’s location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.

Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historiographic and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.

Native American Literature underwent a Renaissance around 1968, and the current canon of novels written in the late twentieth century in American English by Native American or mixed-blood authors is diverse, exciting and flourishing. Despite this, very few such novels are accepted as part of the broader American literary canon.This book offers a valuable and original approach to contemporary Native American literature. Dennis’s contemplation of space and spatialized aesthetics is compelling and persuasive. Considering Native American literature within a modernist framework, and comparing it with writers such as Woolf, Stein, T.S Eliot and Proust results in a valuable and enriching context for the selected texts. Vital reading for scholars of Native American Literature, this book will also provide good grounding in the subject for those with an interest in American and twentieth century literature more generally.

Through a reading of periodicals, memoirs, speeches, and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race, democracy, and citizenship. Reframing 19th century and early 20th-century African-American cultural history from the borderlands of the U.S. empire where many African Americans lived, worked and sought refuge, Knadler argues that these writers developed a complicated and layered transnational and creolized political consciousness that challenged dominant ideas of the nation and citizenship. Writing from multicultural contact zones, these writers forged a "new black politics"—one that anticipated the current debate about national identity and citizenship in a twenty-first century global society. As Knadler argues, they defined, created, and deployed an alternative political language to re-imagine U.S. citizenship and its related ideas of national belonging, patriotism, natural rights, and democratic agency.

This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural production, specifically literature, film, and music, examining how these serve as ways of perceiving the United States and American culture. The volume’s engagement with the reality of transnationalism focuses on material examples that allow for an exploration of concrete manifestations of this phenomenon and trace its development within and outside the United States.Contributors consider the ways in which artifacts or manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, inviting readers to examine the nature of the transnational turn by highlighting the cultural products that represent and produce it. Emphasis on literature, film, and music allows for nuanced perspectives on the way a global phenomenon is enacted in American texts within the U.S, also illustrating the commodification of American culture as these texts travel. The volume therefore serves as a coherent examination of the critical and creative repercussions of transnationalism, and, by juxtaposing a discussion of creativity with critical paradigms, unveils how transnationalism has become one of the constitutive modes of cultural production in the 21st century.

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo's writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns for the fist time.Providing a lucid and nuanced reading of DeLillo's ambivalent engagement with American and European culture, as well as with modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and terrorism, this fascinating volume interrogates the critical and aesthetic capacities of fiction in what is an age of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism.

Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century political liberation movements, the New Woman represents a site of cultural and socio-political contestation and acts as a marker of modernity. This book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK, Canada, North America, Europe, and Japan. The key concept of 'hybridities' is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the 'modern woman' as well as to locate this figure both within international consumer culture and within feminist writing. The book is structured around four key themes. 'Hybridities' examines the instabilities of New Woman identities and discourses in relation to both national/ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. 'Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass' is concerned with the periodical press and its production and circulation of New Woman images. 'Feminist Counter Cultures?' interrogates feminist efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation of New Woman subjectivities. 'Race and the New Woman' inspects white New Women's investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the way in which black and non-Western women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women's Studies, and Women's History.

This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration.Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders.Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the periodicals and communities in which they circulated. With essays on serial fiction published from the 1820s through the 1960s written in ten different languages—English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Yiddish, and Chinese—this collection reflects the rich multilingual history of American literature and periodicals. One of this book’s central claims is that this serial fiction was produced and read within an intensely transnational context: the periodicals often circulated widely, the narratives themselves favored transnational plots and themes, and the contents surrounding the fiction encouraged readers to identify with a community dispersed throughout the United States and often the world. Thus, Okker focuses on the circulation of ideas, periodicals, literary conventions, and people across various borders, focusing particularly on the ways that this fiction reflects the larger transnational realities of these minority communities.

This book is a significant contribution to existing research on the themes of race and slavery in the founding literature of the United States. It extends the boundaries of existing research by locating race and slavery within a transnational and 'oceanic' framework.The author applies critical concepts developed within postcolonial theory to American texts written between the national emergence of the United States and the Civil War, in order to uncover metaphors of the colonial and imperial 'unconscious' in America's foundational writing. The book analyses the writings of canonized authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville alongside those of lesser known writers like Olaudah Equiano, Royall Tyler, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Maxwell Philip, and situates them within the colonial, and 'postcolonial', context of the slave-based economic system of the Black Atlantic.While placing the transatlantic slave trade on the map of American Studies and viewing it in conjunction with American imperial ambitions in the Pacific, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature also adds a historical dimension to present discussions about the 'ambivalence' of postcoloniality.

What is transnationalism and how does it affect American literature?This book examines nineteenth century contexts of transnationalism, translation and American literature. The discussion of transnationalism largely revolves around the question of what role nationalism plays in the spaces and temporalities of the transatlantic. Boggs demonstrates that the assumption that American literature has become transnational only recently – that there is such a thing as an "era" of transnationalism – marks a blindness to the intrinsic transatlanticism of American literature.

The western American landscape has always had great significance in American thinking, requiring an unlikely union between frontier mythology and the reality of a fragile western environment. Additionally it has borne the burden of being a gendered space, seen by some as the traditional "virgin land" of the explorers and pioneers, subject to masculine desires, and by others as a masculine space in which the feminine is neither desired nor appreciated. Both Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy focus on this landscape and environment; its spiritual, narrative, symbolic, imaginative, and ideological force is central to their work. In this study, McGilchrist shows how their various treatments of these issues relate to the social climates (pre- and post-Vietnam era) in which they were written, and how despite historical discontinuities, both Stegner and McCarthy reveal a similar unease about the effects of the myth of the frontier on American thought and life. The gendering of the landscape is revealed as indicative of the attempts to deny the failure of the myth, and to force the often numinous western landscape into parameters which will never contain it. Stegner's pre-Vietnam sensibility allows the natural world to emerge tentatively triumphant from the ruins of frontier mythology, whereas McCarthy's conclusions suggest a darker future for the West in particular and America in general. However, McGilchrist suggests that the conclusion of McCarthy's Border Trilogy, upon which her arguments regarding McCarthy are largely based, offers a gleam of hope in its final conclusion of acceptance of the feminine.

The western American landscape has always had great significance in American thinking, requiring an unlikely union between frontier mythology and the reality of a fragile western environment. Additionally it has borne the burden of being a gendered space, seen by some as the traditional "virgin land" of the explorers and pioneers, subject to masculine desires, and by others as a masculine space in which the feminine is neither desired nor appreciated. Both Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy focus on this landscape and environment; its spiritual, narrative, symbolic, imaginative, and ideological force is central to their work. In this study, McGilchrist shows how their various treatments of these issues relate to the social climates (pre- and post-Vietnam era) in which they were written, and how despite historical discontinuities, both Stegner and McCarthy reveal a similar unease about the effects of the myth of the frontier on American thought and life. The gendering of the landscape is revealed as indicative of the attempts to deny the failure of the myth, and to force the often numinous western landscape into parameters which will never contain it. Stegner's pre-Vietnam sensibility allows the natural world to emerge tentatively triumphant from the ruins of frontier mythology, whereas McCarthy's conclusions suggest a darker future for the West in particular and America in general. However, McGilchrist suggests that the conclusion of McCarthy's Border Trilogy, upon which her arguments regarding McCarthy are largely based, offers a gleam of hope in its final conclusion of acceptance of the feminine.

The last ten years have witnessed an enormous growth in American interest in Asia and Asian/American history. In particular, a set of key Asian historical moments have recently become the subject of intense American cultural scrutiny, namely China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; the Korean American war and its legacy; the era of Japanese geisha culture and its subsequent decline; and China’s one-child policy and the rise of transracial, international adoption in its wake. Grice examines and accounts for this cultural and literary preoccupation, exploring the corresponding historical-political situations that have both circumscribed and enabled greater cultural and political contact between Asia and America.