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American literature abounds with orphans who experience adoption or placements that resemble adoption. These stories do more than recount adventures of children living away from home. They tell an American story of family and national identity. In narratives from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, adoption functions as narrative event and trope that describes the American migratory experience, the impact of Calvinist faith, and the growth of democratic individualism. The roots of literary adoption appear in the discourse of Puritan settlers, who ambivalently took leave of their birth parent country and portrayed themselves as abandoned children. Believing they were chosen childr...
A study of religion and philosophy in the novels and short stories of Edith Wharton, first published in 1995.
Edith Wharton is recognized as one of the twentieth century's most important American writers. The House of Mirth not only initiated three decades of Wharton's popular and critical acclaim, it helped move women's literature into a new place of achievement and prominence. The House of Mirth is perhaps Wharton's best-known and most frequently read novel, and scholars and teachers consider it an essential introduction to Wharton and her work. The novel, moreover, lends itself to a variety of topics of inquiry and critical approaches of interest to readers at various levels. This casebook collects critical essays addressing a broad spectrum of topics and utilizing a range of critical and theoretical approaches. It also includes Wharton's introduction to the 1936 edition of the novel and her discussion of the composition of the novel from her autobiography.
Focusing on the significance of travel in Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, Robert Burden shows how travel enabled a new consciousness of mobility and borders during the modernist period. For these authors, Burden suggests, travel becomes a narrative paradigm and dominant trope by which they explore questions of identity and otherness related to deep-seated concerns with the crisis of national cultural identity. He pays particular attention to the important distinction between travel and tourism, at the same time that he attends to the slippage between seeing and sightseeing, between the local character and the stereotype, between art and kitsch, and between older and newer ways of storytelling in the representational crisis of modernism. Burden argues that the greater awareness of cultural difference that characterizes both the travel writing and fiction of these expatriate writers became a defining feature of literary modernism, resulting in a consciousness of cultural difference that challenged the ethnographic project of empire.
What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always fit easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly "fit" female writers into the "white male" scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, incl...
Illuminates modern consumer culture and its challenges to American identity and values in two classic novels
Bringing together leading Wharton scholars from Europe, and North America, this volume offers the first ever collection of essays on Edith Wharton's 1913 tour de force, The Custom of the Country.
Examines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children’s literature Through close readings of selected titles published since 1945, Jodi Eichler-Levine analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe's pogroms, children’s literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficult collective pasts. In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levin...
Drawing on love studies and research in material cultures, this book seeks to re-examine love through materiality studies, especially their recent incarnations, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy, to spark a debate on the relationship between love, objects and forms of materializing affection. It focuses on love as a material form and traces connections between feelings and materiality, especially in relation to the changing notion of the material as marked by digital culture, as well as the developments in understanding the nature of non-human affect. It provides insight into how materiality, in its broadest sense, impacts the understanding of the meanings and practices of love today and reversely, how love contributes to the production and transformation of the material world.
Today’s critical establishment assumes that sentimentalism is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode that all but disappeared by the twentieth century. In this book, Jennifer Williamson argues that sentimentalism is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, she explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals. Williamson covers new ground by examining authors who are not generall...