The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature

The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature PDF Author: Dalia M.A. Gomaa
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137496266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging study, Gomma examines contemporary migrant narratives by Arab-American, Chicana, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, and Cuban-American women writers. Concepts such as national consciousness, time, space, and belonging are scrutinized through the "non-national" experience, unsettling notions of a unified America.

The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature

The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature PDF Author: Dalia M.A. Gomaa
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137496266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging study, Gomma examines contemporary migrant narratives by Arab-American, Chicana, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, and Cuban-American women writers. Concepts such as national consciousness, time, space, and belonging are scrutinized through the "non-national" experience, unsettling notions of a unified America.

Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel

Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel PDF Author: Mazen Naous
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814214299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Redefines dominant perceptions of Arab Americans via an aesthetic analysis of Arab American novels, launching transcultural possibilities by initiating visibility through poetics.

Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction

Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction PDF Author: Aliki Varvogli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136627022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature

Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature PDF Author: Heike Scharm
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
"Offers an array of disciplinary views on how theories of globalization and an emerging postnational critical imagination have impacted traditional ways of thinking about literature."--Samuel Amago, author of Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film Moving beyond the traditional study of Hispanic literature on a nation-by-nation basis, this volume explores how globalization is currently affecting Spanish and Latin American fiction, poetry, and literary theory. Taking a postnational approach, contributors examine works by José Martí, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Junot Díaz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, and other writers. They discuss how expanding worldviews have impacted the way these authors write and how they are read today. Whether analyzing the increasingly popular character of the voluntary exile, the theme of masculinity in This Is How You Lose Her, or the multilingual nature of the Spanish language itself, they show how contemporary Hispanic writers and critics are engaging in cross-cultural literary conversations. Drawing from a range of fields including postcolonial, Latino, gender, exile, and transatlantic studies, these essays help characterize a new "world" literature that reflects changing understandings of memory, belonging, and identity.

Understanding Diane Johnson

Understanding Diane Johnson PDF Author: Carolyn A. Durham
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611171989
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Understanding Diane Johnson is a biographical and critical study of a quintessential American novelist who has devoted forty-five years to writing about French and American culture. Johnson, who was nominated for the National Book Award three times and the Pulitzer Prize twice, has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books since the 1970s and is the author of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction volumes. Johnson is well known as a comic novelist who addresses serious social problems. Durham outlines Johnson's continued exploration of women's lives and her experimentation with varied forms of narrative technique and genre parody in the detective novels The Shadow Knows and Lying Low, both award-winning novels. Durham examines Johnson's reinvention of the international novel of manners—inherited from Henry James and Edith Wharton—in her best-selling Franco-American trilogy: Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L'Affaire. As the first book-length study of this distinguished American writer, Understanding Diane Johnson surveys an extensive body of work and draws critical attention to a well-published, widely read author who was the winner of the California Book Awards Gold Medal for Fiction in 1997.

Arabian Jazz

Arabian Jazz PDF Author: Diana Abu-Jaber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393324228
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Balances are struck in this luminous first novel-between two radically distinct cultures, between obligation and self-will, between past and future, between hilarity and heartbreak-as the Jordanian family of Matussem Ramoud settles in a small, poor-white community in upstate New York.

Writing for Inclusion

Writing for Inclusion PDF Author: Karen Ruth Kornweibel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683930983
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Writing for Inclusion is a study of some of the ways the idea of national identity developed in the nineteenth century in two neighboring nations, Cuba and The United States. The book examines symbolic, narrative, and sociological commonalities in the writings of four Afro-Cuban and African American writers: Juan Francisco Manzano and Frederick Douglass, fugitive slaves during mid-century; and Martín Morúa Delgado and Charles W. Chesnutt from the post-slavery period. All four share sensitivity to their imperfect inclusion as full citizens, engage in an examination of the process of racialization that hinders them in seeking such inclusion, and contest their definition as non-citizens. Works discussed include the slave narratives of Manzano and Douglass, Manzano’s poetry and play Zafira, andDouglass’s oratory and novella The Heroic Slave. Also considered, within the context provided by Manzano and Douglass, are Morúa and Chesnutt’s non-fiction writings about race and nation as well as their second-generation “tragic mulata” novels Sofía and The House Behind the Cedars. Based on an examination of the works of these four authors, Writing for Inclusion provides a detailed examination of examples of self-emancipation, the authors’ symbolic use of language, their expression of social anxieties or irony within the quest for recognition, and their arguments for an inclusive vision of national identity beyond the quagmires of race. By focusing on the process of racialization and ideas of race and national identity in a comparative context, the study seeks to highlight the artificial and contested nature of both terms and suggest new ways to interrogate them in our present day.

Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction

Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction PDF Author: Kenneth Millard
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748629548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked:* Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the 'fall' of America?* What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?* Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?* What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the conte

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes] PDF Author: Linda De Roche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440853592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1563

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Book Description
This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction

The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction PDF Author: Catherine Morley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.