"Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian literary world has not only experienced a true blossoming of women's prose, but has also witnessed a number of female authors assume the roles ...of literary trendsetters and authoritative critics of their culture. In this first in-depth study of how Ukrainian women's prose writing was able to re-emerge so powerfully after being marginalized in the Soviet era, Oleksandra Wallo examines the writings and literary careers of leading contemporary Ukrainian women authors, such as Oksana Zabuzhko, Ievheniia Kononenko, and Maria Matios. Her study shows how these women reshaped literary culture with their contributions to the development of the Ukrainian national imaginary in the wake of the Soviet state's disintegration. The interjection of women's voices and perspectives into the narratives about the nation has often permitted these writers to highlight the diversity of the national picture and the complexity of the national story. Utilizing insights from postcolonial and nationalism studies, Wallo's book theorizes the interdependence between the national imaginary and narrative plots, and scrutinizes how prominent Ukrainian women authors experimented with literary form in order to rewrite the story of women and nationhood."--
Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to ...capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomised the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterising techniques, styles and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging 2004 study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including Joyce, Eliot, Stein and Barnes.
Jean Toomer'sCanewas advertised as "a book about Negroes by a Negro," despite his request not to promote the book along such racial lines. Nella Larsen switched the title of her second novel ...fromNigtoPassing, because an editor felt the original title "might be too inflammatory." In order to publish his first novel as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection Richard Wright deleted a scene inNative Sondepicting Bigger Thomas masturbating. Toni Morrison changed the last word ofBelovedat her editor's request and switched the title ofParadisefromWarto allay her publisher's marketing concerns.
Although many editors place demands on their authors, these examples invite special scholarly attention given the power imbalance between white editors and publishers and African American authors.Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literatureexamines the complex negotiations behind the production of African American literature.
In chapters on Larsen'sPassing, Ishmael Reed'sMumbo Jumbo, Gwendolyn Brooks'sChildren Coming Home, Morrison's "Oprah's Book Club" selections, and Ralph Ellison'sJuneteenth, John K. Young presents the first book-length application of editorial theory to African American literature. Focusing on the manuscripts, drafts, book covers, colophons, and advertisements that trace book production, Young expands upon the concept of socialized authorship and demonstrates how the study of publishing history and practice and African American literary criticism enrich each other.
John K. Young is an associate professor of English at Marshall University. His work has appeared in journals such asCollege English,African American Review, andCritique.
Did William Shakespeare ever meet Queen Elizabeth I? There is no evidence of such a meeting, yet for three centuries writers and artists have been provoked and inspired to imagine it. S hakespeare ...and Elizabeth is the first book to explore the rich history of invented encounters between the poet and the Queen, and examines how and why the mythology of these two charismatic and enduring cultural icons has been intertwined in British and American culture. Helen Hackett follows the history of meetings between Shakespeare and Elizabeth through historical novels, plays, paintings, and films, ranging from well-known works such as Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth and the film Shakespeare in Love to lesser known but equally fascinating examples. Raising intriguing questions about the boundaries separating scholarship and fiction, Hackett looks at biographers and critics who continue to delve into links between the queen and the poet. In the Shakespeare authorship controversy there have even been claims that Shakespeare was Elizabeth's secret son or lover, or that Elizabeth herself was the genius Shakespeare. Hackett uncovers the reasons behind the lasting appeal of their combined reputations, and she locates this interest in their enigmatic sexual identities, as well as in the ways they represent political tensions and national aspirations. Considering a wealth of examples, Shakespeare and Elizabeth shows how central this double myth is to both elite and popular culture in Britain and the United States, and how vibrantly it is reshaped in different eras.
Jennifer Phegley presents an examination of four mid-Victorian magazines that middle-class women read widely. Educating the Proper Woman Reader reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed ...relationship between nineteenth-century women readers and literary critics. While many scholars have explored the ways nineteenth-century critics expressed their anxiety about the dangers of women's unregulated and implicitly uncritical reading practices, which were believed to threaten the sanctity of the home and the cultural status of the nation, Phegley argues that family literary magazines revolutionized the position of women as consumers of print by characterizing them as educated readers and able critics. Her analysis of images of influential women readers (in Harper's), intellectual women readers (in The Cornhill), independent women readers (in Belgravia), and proto-feminist women readers/critics (in Victoria) indicates that women played a significant role in determining the boundaries of literary culture within these magazines. She argues that these publications supported women's reading choices, inviting them to define literary culture rather than to consume it passively. Not only does this book revise our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women readers but it also takes a fresh look at the transatlantic context of literary production. Further, Phegley demonstrates the role these publications played in improving cultural literacy among women of the middle classes as well as the interplay between fiction and essays of the time by writers such as Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, George Sala, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.
This book takes a fascinating look at the iconic figure of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the Revolutionary War to the early twentieth century, and examining how Native ...Americans regarded the British, as well as how they challenged their own cultural image in Britain during this period. Kate Flint shows how the image of the Indian was used in English literature and culture for a host of ideological purposes, and she reveals its crucial role as symbol, cultural myth, and stereotype that helped to define British identity and its attitude toward the colonial world.Through close readings of writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, Flint traces how the figure of the Indian was received, represented, and transformed in British fiction and poetry, travelogues, sketches, and journalism, as well as theater, paintings, and cinema. She describes the experiences of the Ojibwa and Ioway who toured Britain with George Catlin in the 1840s; the testimonies of the Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; and the performances and polemics of the Iroquois poet Pauline Johnson in London. Flint explores transatlantic conceptions of race, the role of gender in writings by and about Indians, and the complex political and economic relationships between Britain and America. The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 argues that native perspectives are essential to our understanding of transatlantic relations in this period and the development of transnational modernity.
InMedieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest ...and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking world, she reads theChanson de Roland, thelaisof Marie de France, and a variety of other texts in an expanded geographical frame that includes the Iberian peninsula, the Welsh marches, and the eastern Mediterranean. In Kinoshita's reconceptualization of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the medieval West, such places become significant not only as sites of conflict but also as spaces of intense political, economic, and cultural negotiation. An important contribution to the emerging field of medieval postcolonialism, Kinoshita's work explores the limitations of reading the literature of the French Middle Ages as an inevitable link in the historical construction of modern discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, race, and Christian-Muslim conflict. Rather, drawing on recent historical and art historical scholarship, Kinoshita uncovers a vernacular culture at odds with official discourses of crusade and conquest. Situating each work in its specific context, she brings to light the lived experiences of the knights and nobles for whom this literature was first composed and-in a series of close readings informed by postcolonial and feminist theory-demonstrates that literary representations of cultural encounters often provided the pretext for questioning the most basic categories of medieval identity. Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies
Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture-from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the ...advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. InFrantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition.
For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms.
Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism,Frantic Panoramasis an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.
By exploring a rich array of Malay texts from novels and newspapers to poems and plays, Tom G. Hoogervorst's Language Ungoverned examines how the Malay of the Chinese-Indonesian community defied ...linguistic and political governance under Dutch colonial rule, offering a fresh perspective on the subversive role of language in colonial power relations. As a liminal colonial population, the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia resorted to the press for their education, legal and medical advice, conflict resolution, and entertainment. Hoogervorst deftly depicts how the linguistic choices made by these print entrepreneurs brought Chinese-inflected Malay to the fore as the language of popular culture and everyday life, subverting the official Malay of the Dutch authorities. Through his readings of Sino-Malay print culture published between the 1910s and 1940s, Hoogervorst highlights the inherent value of this vernacular Malay as a language of the people.
Founded in 1868, theOverland Monthlywas a San Francisco-based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. ...Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in theOverland Monthlyoften portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy.
Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities.Reading for Liberalismexamines the shifting literary and narrative construction of liberal selfhood in California in the late nineteenth century through case studies of a number of western American writers who wrote for theOverland Monthly, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others.Reading for Liberalismargues that Harte, the magazine's founding editor, and the other members of theOverlandgroup critiqued and reimagined the often invisible fabric of American freedom.Reading for Liberalismuncovers and examines in the text of theOverland Monthlythe relationship between wilderness, literature, race, and the production of individual freedom in late nineteenth-century California.
