The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volumes C ,D, E (Norton Anthology) Reviews
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
Not Even Past: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten (American Literatures Initiative) For Sale
Product Overview
Not Even Past highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is not even past,narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail.Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yet even in their very failure, three U.S. modernists tell us that it is not enough simply to exercise critical acuity on the marks of past violence. Reading, however masterly, cannot interrupt a history in the midst of repeating itself; it can only itself reiterate the disaster.
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Thursday, August 2, 2012
American Georgics: Economy and Environment in American Literature, 1580-1864 For Sale
American Georgics: Economy and Environment in American Literature, 1580-1864 Reviews
Product Overview
In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic.
Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the foundational text in the conservationist movement.
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Wednesday, August 1, 2012
American Culture: An Anthology of Civilization Texts For Sale
American Culture: An Anthology of Civilization Texts Reviews
Product Overview
American Culture is an anthology of primary, documentary texts of American civilisation using excerpts from speeches, political addresses, articles, interviews, oral histories, autobiographies, advertisements and song lyrics.
Edited by academics who are highly experienced in the study and teaching of American Studies across a wide range of institutions, this volume provides:
* a wide range of texts that introduce the students to various sides of American society in an historical perspective: its regions, immigration, social structure, ethnic groups, ideology, religion and popular culture
* primary sources of American life that students themselves can subject to cultural analysis and discussions in class
* linking text arranged thematically
* a means of seeing and understanding the ways in which language and culture are closely related, enabling students to integrate the study of culture and language and develop a combination of linguistic and cultural analytical skills.
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Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism For Sale
Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism Reviews
Product Overview
The 1991 landmark edition of Feminisms presented the most comprehensive collection of American and British feminist literary criticism ever published. By 1997, realizing the need to update the work to remain within the expanded parameters of feminist literary discourse, the volume was revised to include more than two dozen new essays.Now, at the dawn of a new century of thought and action, it is important once again to revisit the canon of feminist literary criticism and theory and re-establish the measure for representing the latest developments in the field. Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl have joined together once more to provide academics and general readers with a newly revised and indispensable collection of essays representing the range of feminist literary criticism.
Feminisms Redux, presented in a concise format, includes many essays from the second edition that continue to speak to current concerns and also provides readers with new contributions that address work in postcolonial studies, queer theory, and disability studies. As in the earlier volumes, the editors have gathered the full text of original articles and book chapters, with no edited excerpts. The range of essays focuses not only on gender and sex, but also on sexuality, race, class, nationality, and (dis)ability, and the intersections among these categories as they play out in writing by and about women. More than a revision of archetypal work, Feminisms Redux represents the dawning of a new classic.
(20100901)
Read more Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism
Now, at the dawn of a new century of thought and action, it is important once again to revisit the canon of feminist literary criticism and theory and re-establish the measure for representing the latest developments in the field. Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl have joined together once more to provide academics and general readers with a newly revised and indispensable collection of essays representing the range of feminist literary criticism.
Feminisms Redux, presented in a concise format, includes many essays from the second edition that continue to speak to current concerns and also provides readers with new contributions that address work in postcolonial studies, queer theory, and disability studies. As in the earlier volumes, the editors have gathered the full text of original articles and book chapters, with no edited excerpts. The range of essays focuses not only on gender and sex, but also on sexuality, race, class, nationality, and (dis)ability, and the intersections among these categories as they play out in writing by and about women. More than a revision of archetypal work, Feminisms Redux represents the dawning of a new classic.
Monday, July 30, 2012
The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume B: Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865 For Sale
The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume B: Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865 Reviews
Product Overview
Unrivaled diversity and teachability have made The Heath Anthology a best-selling text. In presenting a more inclusive canon of American literature, The Heath Anthology changed the way American literature is taught. The Sixth Edition continues to balance the traditional, leading names in American literature with lesser-known writers and have built upon the anthology's other strengths: its apparatus and its ancillaries.
Read more The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume B: Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865
Sunday, July 29, 2012
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