The years between 1880 and 1930 are usually seen as a time in which American writers replaced values and traditions of the Victorian era with wholly new works of modernist literature, and the turn of the century is typically used as a dividing line between the old and the new. Challenging this periodization, this volume argues that this entire time span should instead be studied as a coherent and complex literary field.
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In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II.
In this book, Ashley Lear examines the relationship between two pioneers of American literature who broke the mold for women writers of their time.
Sacraments of Memory is the first book to focus on Catholic themes and imagery in African American literature. Erin Michael Salius discovers striking elements of the religion in neo-slave narratives written by Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Leon Forrest, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Charles R. Johnson, and Edward P. Jones.
At Fault is an exhilarating celebration of risk-taking in the work of James Joyce. Esteemed Joyce scholar and teacher Sebastian Knowles takes on the American university system, arguing that the modernist writer offers the antidote to the risk-averse attitudes that are increasingly constraining institutions of higher education today.
Ideal for readers new to Ulysses and written with a depth of knowledge that scholars have found invaluable, “Ulysses” Unbound is a clear and comprehensive guide to James Joyce’s masterpiece from one of the foremost Dublin-based Joyce experts.
A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love--Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America's racial divide.
Looking closely at nineteenth-century texts and twentieth-century novels written by African American women about antebellum America, Resistance Reimagined highlights examples of black women’s activism within a society that spoke so much of freedom but granted it so selectively.
Making the case that legal issues are central to James Joyce’s life and work, international experts in law and literature offer new insights into Joyce’s most important texts. They analyze Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake in light of the legal contexts of Joyce’s day.
In a daring rewrite of literary history, this volume argues that the medieval poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut was the major influence in narrative craft during the late Middle Ages and long after.