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First published in 1996. Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European people and places. In the exotic, uncomplicated and malleable settings of stories like Robinson Crusoe, they make it possible to imagine, and to naturalise and normalise, identities that might seem implausible closer to home. This book discusses the geography of literature and looking at where adventure stories chart colonies and empires, projecting European geographical fantasies onto non-European, real geographies, including the Americas, Africa and Australasia.

Winfried Siemerling examines alterity in the work of four innovative postmodern authors, exploring self and other as textual figures of the unknown. Subjectivity appears mediated, in these texts, by a self-reflexive work in language, seeking to grasp itself in relation to a significant and often fascinating, but also enigmatic, other.

'... methodologically innovative... precise and perceptive and conscious...'—Text and Performance Quarterly'Woman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color.'—Chandra Talpade Mohanty'The idea of Trinh T. Minh-ha is as powerful as her films... formidable...'—Village Voice'... its very forms invite the reader to participate in the effort to understand how language structures lived possibilities.'—Artpaper'Highly recommended for anyone struggling to understand voices and experiences of those'we'label'other'.'—Religious Studies ReviewAudio book narrated by Betty Miller. Produced by Speechki in 2021.

Ring Lardner and the Other is actually two books, mutually embedded. The first is about Ring Lardner: a long reading of a single Lardner short story,'Who Dealt?', a briefer look at his life and work, and an exploration of his reception. The second is about the'Other,'in an expanded Lacanian sense: the speaking of various unconscious voices (mother and father and child, culture and anarchy, majority and minority) through literary characters and their authors and readers. The Lardner book explores the contradictions of Lardner's patriarchal masculinity--how such a dour, sexist alcoholic who hated humor and bad grammar could have created such a rich body of minoritarian writing, steeped in the emergent voices of women and the lower middle class--and the social functions served by Lardner's writing in twentieth-century America. The other book exfoliates Lacan's germinal concept of the Other by interweaving it with a series of theoretical formulations by Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari, and others. Robinson's book is an important reappraisal of a critically neglected American writer of the teens and twenties. The book includes an essay by Ellen Gardiner.

This book looks at how differences among women have been textually represented at a variety of historical moments and in a variety of cultural contexts, including Victorian mainstream fiction, African-American mulatto novels, late twentieth-century lesbian communities, and contemporary country music. Sororophobia designates the complex and shifting relations between women's attempts to identify with other women and their often simultaneous desire to establish and retain difference. Michie argues for the centrality to feminism of a paradigm that moves beyond celebrations of identity and sisterhood to a more nuanced notion of women's relations with other women which may include such uncomfortable concepts as envy, jealousy, and competition as well as more institutionalized ideas of difference such as race and class. Chapters on literature are interspersed by'inter-chapters'on the choreography of sameness and difference among women in popular culture.

Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni's Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture.Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature.Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young

This dynamic, open-minded collection of essays responds to the issues raised by Werner Sollors when he argues against the rigidity of cultural pluralism, against the ethnic group-by-group segregation of American literature. Instead he calls for an openly transethinic recognition of cross-cultural interplays and connections among all so-called groups and their canons. In enthusiastic response to such issues, the contributors explore a variety of approaches to pluralism, multiculturalism, group identity, and the problematics of authenticity in literary texts and criticism both historically and currently. The scholars in this civil, persuasive volume are at home in an international world that crosses linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. They thus transcend the customary restrictions of earlier, relatively isolationist scholarship to form new, nonpolemical links among cultural identities. This relationship between oral modes of communal identity and writing in tribal cultures joins an examination of Houston Baker's discursive strategies. A consideration of ethnic humor in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Jerre Mangione and a discussion of Jean Toomer's racial persona offer striking contextualizations. Two contributors study discursive constructions of mestizaje in Chicano/a texts, followed by essays on cultural difference in Faulkner's Light in August and Roth's Call It Sleep.Finally, Werner Sollers's essay extends the interactions among all these energetic, nonjudgmental dialogues.

When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern'would pluck out the heart of [his] mystery', he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England. The struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart is rehearsed not only in plays but in legal records, correspondence, philosophical writing and contemporary social description. In this book Elizabeth Hanson argues that the construction of other people as objects of discovery signalled a reconceptualizing of the'subject'in both the political and philosophical sense of the term. She examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson,'cony-catching'pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing, to demonstrate that the subject was both under suspicion and empowered in this period. Her account revises earlier attempts to locate the emergence of modern subjectivity in the Renaissance, arguing for a more nuanced and localized understanding of the relationship with its medieval past.

In this ambitious work Anita Levy exposes certain forms of middle-class power that have been taken for granted as'common sense'and'laws of nature.'Joining an emergent tradition of cultural historians who draw on Gramsci and Foucault, she shows how middle-class hegemony in the nineteenth century depended on notions of gender to legitimize a culture-specific and class-specific definition of the right and wrong ways of being human. The author examines not only domestic fiction, particularly Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights, but also nineteenth-century works of the human sciences, including sociological tracts, anthropological treatises, medical texts, and psychological studies. She finds that British intellectuals of the period produced gendered standards of behavior that did not so much subordinate women to men as they authorized the social class whose women met norms of'appropriate'behavior: this class was considered to be peculiarly fit to care for other social and cultural groups whose women were'improperly'gendered. When Levy reads fiction against the social sciences, she demonstrates that the history of fiction cannot be understood apart from the history of the human sciences. Both fiction and science share common narrative strategies for representing the'essential'female and'other women'--the prostitute, the'primitive,'and the madwoman. Only fiction, however, represented these strategies in an idiom of everyday life that verified'theory'and'science.'Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture? In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.Contributors: Mary Baine Campbell, Brandeis U; David L. Clark, McMaster U; Frank Grady, U of Missouri, St. Louis; David A. Hedrich Hirsch, U of Illinois; Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell U; Stephen Pender; Allison Pingree, Harvard U; Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College; John O'Neill, York U; William Sayers, George Washington U; Michael Uebel, U of Virginia; Ruth Waterhouse.