American category: 24906 books
American Fiction
The Intellectual Background
Language: English
Release Date: October 23, 2017
Originally published in 1963. The ‘Americanness’ of the American novel is as readily apparent as it is elusive of definition. It is the purpose of this study not to discover the reluctant formula, the comprehensive statement of national identity, but to examine the evidences of this identity in...
The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill
American Modernism on the World Stage
Language: English
Release Date: November 16, 2017
Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2018
The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill offers a new comprehensive overview of O'Neill's career and plays in the context of the American theatre. Organised thematically, it considers his modernist intervention in the theatre, offers readers detailed...
National Abjection
The Asian American Body Onstage
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2002
National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness” through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection—a process...
Liberation Memories
The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2003
No serious history of the development of the African American novel from the 1950s onward can be written without reference to John Oliver Killens. A two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and founding chairman of the legendary Harlem Writers Guild, Killens was regarded by many as a spiritual father...
The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art
Performing Identity
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 2013
This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones,...
Sites of Slavery
Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination
Language: English
Release Date: July 26, 2012
More than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists...
Race Consciousness
Reinterpretations for the New Century
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 1997
Bringing together an impressive range of new scholarship deeply informed both by the legacies of the past and current intellectual trends, Race Consciousness is a veritable Who's Who of the next generation of scholars of African-American studies. This collection of original essays, representing the...
In the Shadow of the Gallows
Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2012
From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why, Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon from the far more revealing...
The Genuine Article
Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood
Language: English
Release Date: November 28, 2001
In The Genuine Article Paul Gilmore examines the interdependence of literary and mass culture at a crucial moment in U. S. history. Demonstrating from a new perspective the centrality of race to the construction of white manhood across class lines, Gilmore argues that in the years before the Civil...
by Paula T. Connolly
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2013
Long seen by writers as a vital political force of the nation, children’s literature has been an important means not only of mythologizing a certain racialized past but also, because of its intended audience, of promoting a specific racialized future. Stories about slavery for children have served...
Race Matters, Animal Matters
Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1840-1930
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2017
Race Matters, Animal Matters challenges one of the grand narratives of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Analyzing canonical texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B....
The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison
Speaking the Unspeakable
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2000
A traditional yet fresh approach to grasping the power of Morrison's writing With essays by Yvonne Atkinson, Marc C. Conner, Susan Corey, Maria DiBattista, Barbara Johnson, Cheryl Lester, Katherine Stern, and Michael Wood Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined...
Red Matters
Native American Studies
Language: English
Release Date: August 3, 2010
Arnold Krupat, one of the most original and respected critics working in Native American studies today, offers a clear and compelling set of reasons why red—Native American culture, history, and literature—should matter to Americans more than it has to date. Although there exists a growing body...
by Ann González
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2018
In this volume González explores how the effects of a traumatic colonial experience are (re)presented to Latin American children today, almost two centuries after the dismantling of colonialism proper. Central to this study is the argument that the historical constraints of colonialism, neocolonialism,...