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Scholars have problematized otherness and madness in diverse ways. There are those who hold that otherness is madness in itself of which leading voices are Michel Foucault and Gregory Reid. Other scholars contradict these voices and single out madness as a clinical condition that arises from strands of othering such as political, gender, class, age and racial. Frantz Fanon is the leading voice of this school of thought that demonstrates how othering destroys the psyche of the marginalised groups. This book extends Fanon's thesis with regard to madness in selected works of African fiction. Whereas Fanon stops at conceptualisation of the nexus between othering and madness, in this book, the authors incorporate the fragmented self, which is equally disabling.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee is one of the most widely taught contemporary writers, but also one of the most elusive. Many critics who have addressed his work have devoted themselves to rendering it more accessible and acceptable, often playing down the features that discomfort and perplex his readers. Yet it is just these features, Derek Attridge argues, that give Coetzee's work its haunting power and offer its greatest rewards. Attridge does justice to this power and these rewards in a study that serves as an introduction for readers new to Coetzee and a stimulus for thought for those who know his work well. Without overlooking the South African dimension of his fiction, Attridge treats Coetzee as a writer who raises questions of central importance to current debates both within literary studies and more widely in the ethical arena. Implicit throughout the book is Attridge's view that literature, more than philosophy, politics, or even religion, does singular justice to our ethical impulses and acts. Attridge follows Coetzee's lead in exploring a number of issues such as interpretation and literary judgment, responsibility to the other, trust and betrayal, artistic commitment, confession, and the problematic idea of truth to the self.

Diversità sulla scena è una raccolta di undici saggi scritti da critici e studiosi di teatro che affrontano la problematica del rapporto tra teatro e la creazione di una coscienza politica filtrata dalle voci di soggetti subalterni. Il volume è arricchito dai contributi di protagonisti della scena italiana che, nella loro veste di autori, attori e registi, denunciano pregiudizi e conformismo dando voce in tal modo a aree sociali tenute ai margini. In questa panoramica del teatro delle differenze, il volume offre una stimolante chiave di lettura della società contemporanea. Pur marginale nel mondo multimediale, paradossalmente il teatro collocato entro spazi emarginati ridiventa centrale e si riappropria di funzioni vitali, quasi finestra aperta, meglio cuore e polmone nella stessa società. Diversità sulla scena affronta argomenti articolati, dal punto di vista multiculturale e geografico, nella misura in cui collega territori di natura antropologica, culturale e traduttiva, grazie a nuove letture critiche dalla bibliografia altresì aggiornata.

Young adult novels are a great place to find characters who are a lot like you. Maybe they are new to school, are dealing with being bullied, or feel like they just don't fit in. By reading realistic fiction books, you can read about someone who is going through similar experiences. Highlighting the elements found in realistic fiction novels, this book examines the different types of internal struggles found in YA fiction. Developed by Timothy Rasinski and Lori Oczkus, and featuring TIME content, this book builds reading skills and includes essential text features like an index, captions, glossary, and table of contents. The detailed sidebars, fascinating images, and Dig Deeper section prompt students to connect back to the text and encourage multiple readings. Check It Out! includes suggested resources for further reading. Aligned with state standards, this title features complex content appropriate for students preparing for college and career readiness.

Focusing on representational approaches to emotion during the years of American literary realism's dominance and in the works of such authors as Edith Wharton, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. D. Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and others, Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy contends that emotional representations were central to the self-conscious construction of high realism (in the mid-1880s) and to the interrogation of its boundaries. Based on realist-era authors'rejection of “sentimentalism” and its reduction of emotional diversity (a tendency to stress what Karen Sanchez-Eppler has described as sentimental fiction's investment in “overcoming difference”), Melanie Dawson argues that realist-era investments in emotional detail were designed to confront differences of class, gender, race, and circumstance directly. She explores the ways in which representational practices that approximate scientific methods often led away from scientific theories and rejected rigid attempts at creating emotional taxonomies. She argues that ultimately realist-era authors demonstrated a new investment in individuated emotional histories and experiences that sought to honor all affective experiences on their own terms.

Combining sustained empirical analysis of reading group conversations with four case studies of classic and contemporary novels: Things Fall Apart, White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island, this book pursues what can be gained through a comparative approach to reading and readerships.

This work addresses Yeats's'antinomies', seeing their origin and structure in his divided Anglo-Irish inheritance and examining the notion of measure. It then explores how this relates to freemasonry, Celticism and Orientalism and looks at the Blakean esoteric language of contrariety and outline which provided Yeats with the vocabulary of self-understanding.

In this engaging cross-disciplinary study, Timothy Murray examines the artistic struggle over traumatic fantasies of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Establishing a retrospective dialogue between past and present, stage and video, Drama Trauma links the impact of trauma on recent political projects in performance and video with the specters of difference haunting Shakespeare's plays. The book provides close readings of cultural formations as diverse as Shakespearean drama, the Statue of Liberty, contemporary plays by women, African-American performance, and feminist interventions in video, performance and installation. The texts discussed include: • installations by Mary Kelly and Dawn Dedeaux, • plays by Ntozake Shange, Rochelle Owens, Adrienne Kennedy, Marsha Norman and Amiri Baraka • performances by Robbie McCauley, Jordan, Orlan, and Carmelita Tropicana • stage, film and video productions of King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and All's Well that Ends Well.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

How and why did a country seen as remote, backwards, and barely European become a pivotal site for reinventing the continent after the Great War? Modernism and the New Spain argues that the'Spanish problem'-the nation's historically troubled relationship with Europe-provided an animating impulse for interwar literary modernism and for new conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Drawing on works in a variety of genres, Gayle Rogers reconstructs an archive of cross-cultural exchanges to reveal the mutual constitution of two modernist movements-one in Britain, the other in Spain, and stretching at key moments in between to Ireland and the Americas. Several sites of transnational collaboration form the core of Rogers's innovative literary history. The relationship between T. S. Eliot's Criterion and José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente shows how the two journals joined to promote a cosmopolitan agenda. A similar case of kindred spirits appears with the 1922 publication of Joyce's Ulysses. The novel's forward-thinking sentiments on race and nation resonated powerfully within Spain, where a generation of writers searched for non-statist forms through which they might express a new European Hispanicity. These cultural ties between the Anglo-Irish and Spanish-speaking worlds increased with the outbreak of civil war in 1936. Rogers explores the connections between fighting Spanish fascism and dismantling the English patriarchal system in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, along with the international, anti-fascist poetic community formed by Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and others as they sought to establish Federico García Lorca as an apolitical Spanish-European poet. Mining a rich array of sources that includes novels, periodicals, biographies, translations, and poetry in English and in Spanish, Modernism and the New Spain adds a vital new international perspective to modernist studies, revealing how writers created alliances that unified local and international reforms to reinvent Europe not in the London-Paris-Berlin nexus, but in Madrid.

Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as'urban underworlds'and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin. The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.

A fresh exploration of the representation of poverty and class in American literature and film, through the juxtaposition of films, writings and the unusual lives of Zora Neale Hurston, Stephen Crane, Henry Miller and Michel Foucault. The book argues for Hurston's centrality, not merely to the African-American canon, but to the American tradition.

A challenge to traditional criticism, this engaging study demonstrates that issues of sexuality-and same-sex desire in particular-were of central importance in the literary production of the Southern Renaissance. Especially during the end of that period-approximately the 1940s and 1950s-the national literary establishment tacitly designated the South as an allowable setting for fictionalized deviancy, thus permitting southern writers tremendous freedom to explore sexual otherness. In Lovers and Beloveds, Gary Richards draws on contemporary theories of sexuality in reading the fiction of six writers of the era who accepted that potentially pejorative characterization as an opportunity: Truman Capote, William Goyen, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith, and Richard Wright. Richards skillfully juxtaposes forgotten texts by those writers with canonical works to identify the complex narratives of same-sex desire. In their novels and stories, the authors consistently reimagine gender roles, centralize homoeroticism, and probe its relationship with class, race, biological sex, and southern identity. This is the first book to assess the significance of same-sex desire in a broad range of southern texts, making a crucial contribution to the study of both literature and sexuality.

Poetry by Asian American writers has had a significant impact on the landscape of contemporary American poetry, and a book-length critical treatment of Asian American poetry is long overdue. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaojing Zhou demonstrates how many Asian American poets transform the conventional “I” of lyric poetry—based on the traditional Western concept of the self and the Cartesian “I”—to enact a more ethical relationship between the “I” and its others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the ethics of alterity—which argues that an ethical relation to the other is one that acknowledges the irreducibility of otherness—Zhou offers a reconceptualization of both self and other. Taking difference as a source of creativity and turning it into a form of resistance and a critical intervention, Asian American poets engage with broader issues than the merely poetic. They confront social injustice against the other and call critical attention to a concept of otherness which differs fundamentally from that underlying racism, sexism, and colonialism. By locating the ethical and political questions of otherness in language, discourse, aesthetics, and everyday encounters, Asian American poets help advance critical studies in race, gender, and popular culture as well as in poetry. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity is not limited, however, to literary studies: it is an invaluable response to the questions raised by increasingly globalized encounters across many kinds of boundaries. The Poets Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Myung Mi Kim, Li Young Lee, Timothy Liu, David Mura, and John Yau

Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. This fascinating study provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to these leading poets and the public, during the early years of the Nineteenth-Century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.

Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers'enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence. As Coviello shows, race - and especially whiteness - functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness created an imaginary fraternity that symbolized citizenship, the ownership of property, and an affinity between strangers, which became entangled in the nation's evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and'white studies'into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies. Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the national meanings of race and sex in American literature, as well as on the still-current dream of American-ness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others.

Although Gothic writing is now seen as significant for an understanding of modernity, it is still largely characterized as a literature of fear and anxiety. Gothic and the Comic Turn argues that, partly through its desire to be taken seriously, Gothic criticism has neglected the comic doppelganger that has always inhabited the Gothic mode and which in certain texts emerges as dominant. Tracing an historical trajectory from the late Romantic period through to the present day, this book examines how varieties of comic parody and appropriation have interrogated the complexities of modern subjectivity.

When considering the question of what makes us human, the ancient Greeks provided numerous suggestions. This book argues that the defining criterion in the Hellenic world, however, was the most obvious one: speech. It explores how it was the capacity for authoritative speech which was held to separate humans from other animals, gods from humans, men from women, Greeks from non-Greeks, citizens from slaves, and the mundane from the heroic. John Heath illustrates how Homer's epics trace the development of immature young men into adults managing speech in entirely human ways and how in Aeschylus'Oresteia only human speech can disentangle man, beast, and god. Plato's Dialogues are shown to reveal the consequences of Socratically imposed silence. With its examination of the Greek focus on speech, animalization, and status, this book offers new readings of key texts and provides significant insights into the Greek approach to understanding our world.

This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as'metropolitan autoethnographies'that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. Disorienting Fiction shows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of the National Tale and, most influentially, by Walter Scott. Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being. Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.

Victorian domestic novels routinely detect a savage otherness lurking within the English state and subject. Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel charts the development of this irony within evangelical and anthropological discourses and studies its emergence in the major works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Meredith. Each of these writers disrupts the certitudes of imperial ideology by appropriating the language of ethnography and using it to describe the social domestic field. Providing fresh readings of both canonical and neglected novels, this original volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Nineteenth-Century literature and Postcolonial studies.

Literary use of the Gothic is marked by an anxious encounter with otherness, with the dark and mysterious unknown. From its earliest manifestations in the turbulent eighteenth century, this seemingly escapist mode has provided for authors a useful ground upon which to safely confront very real fears and horrors. The essays here examine texts in which Gothic fear is relocated onto the figure of the racial and social Other, the Other who replaces the supernatural ghost or grotesque monster as the code for mystery and danger, ultimately becoming as horrifying, threatening and unknowable as the typical Gothic manifestation. The range of essays reveals that writers from many canons and cultures are attracted to the Gothic as a ready medium for expression of racial and social anxieties. The essays are grouped into sections that focus on such topics as race, religion, class, and centers of power.

This study of Lawrence's travel writings is the first book-length study to approach the subject with reference to contemporary post-colonial theory. Focusing on the writings of 1921-25, the period when Lawrence was most intensely engaged in travel, it includes chapters on Sea and Sardinia, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent and the essays and stories inspired by Lawrence's experience of the New World.

This work examines early twentieth-century literature about women immigrants in order to reveal the differing ways that American racial categories and identities, particularly that of whiteness, were textually and socially constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Accounts of women's transgressive behavior in eighteenth-century literature and social documents have much to teach us about constructions of femininity during the period often identified as having formed our society's gender norms. Lewd and Notorious explores the eighteenth century's shadows, inhabited by marginal women of many kinds and degrees of contrariness. The reader meets Laetitia Pilkington, whose sexual indiscretions caused her to fall from social and literary grace to become an articulate memoirist of personal scandal, and Elizabeth Brownrigg, who tortured and starved her young servants, propelling herself to an infamy comparable to Susan Smith's or Myra Hindley's. More awful women wait between these covers to teach us about society's reception (and construction) of their debauchery and dangerousness. The authors draw upon a rich range of contemporary texts to illuminate the lives of these women. Astute analysis of literary, legal, evangelical, epistolary, and political documents provides an understanding of 1700s womanhood. From lusty old maids to murderous mistresses, the characters who exemplify this period's vision of women on the edge are essential acquaintances for anyone wishing to understand the development and ramifications of conceptions of femininity. Katharine Kittredge is Associate Professor of English, Ithaca College.

In its analysis of Animal Farm, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this book argues that George Orwell's fiction and non-fiction weigh the benefits and costs of adopting a doubled perspective - in other words, seeing one's own interests in relation to those of others - and illustrate how decency follows from such a perspective. Establishing this relationship within Orwell's work, Anthony Stewart demonstrates how Orwell's characters'ability to treat others decently depends upon the characters'relative capacities for doubleness.

In Joseph Conrad's tales, representations of women and of'feminine'generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad's use of allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of'masculine'tales of adventure and intrigue and'feminine'dramas of love or domesticity are among the subjects of this literary study. Many of Conrad's critics have argued that Conrad's fictions are aesthetically flawed by the inclusion of women and love plots; thus Thomas Moser has questioned why Conrad did not'cut them out altogether.'Yet a thematics of gender suffuses Conrad's narrative strategies. Even in tales that contain no significant female characters or obvious love plots, Conrad introduces elusive feminine presences, in relationships between men, as well as in men's relationships to their ship, the sea, a shore breeze, or even in the gendered embrace of death. This book investigates an identifiably feminine'point of view'which is present in fugitive ways throughout Conrad's canon. Conrad's narrative strategies are articulated through a language of sexual difference that provides the vocabulary and grammar for tales examining European class, racial, and gender paradigms to provide acute and, at times, equivocal investigations of femininity and difference.

The closely entwined histories of Portugal and Brazil remain key references for understanding developments—past and present—in either country. Accordingly, Fernando Arenas considers Portugal and Brazil in relation to one another in this exploration of changing definitions of nationhood, subjectivity, and utopias in both cultures. Examining the two nations's shared language and histories as well as their cultural, social, and political points of divergence, Arenas pursues these definitive changes through the realms of literature, intellectual thought, popular culture, and political discourse. Both Brazil and Portugal are subject to the economic, political, and cultural forces of postmodern globalization. Arenas analyzes responses to these trends in contemporary writers including José Saramago, Caio Fernando Abreu, Maria Isabel Barreno, Vergílio Ferreira, Clarice Lispector, and Maria Gabriela Llansol. Ultimately, Utopias of Otherness shows how these writers have redefined the concept of nationhood, not only through their investment in utopian or emancipatory causes such as Marxist revolution, women's liberation, or sexual revolution, but also by shifting their attention to alternative modes of conceiving the ethical and political realms.

In this wide-ranging analysis, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that African American life and history is more diverse than even African American critics generally acknowledge. Focusing on literary representations of African American males in particular, Hogue examines works by James Weldon Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Nathan Heard, Clarence Major, James Earl Hardy, and Don Belton to see how they portray middle-class, Christian, subaltern, voodoo, urban, jazz/blues, postmodern, and gay African American cultures. Hogue shows that this polycentric perspective can move beyond a'racial uplift'approach to African American literature and history and help paint a clearer picture of the rich diversity of African American life and culture.

George Eliot was one of the great thinkers of her time, a figure central to the main currents of thought and belief in the nineteenth century. Yet when this distinguished public intellectual turned to fiction writing at the age of thirty-six, she regarded it not as a lesser pursuit, but as the distillation of all of her knowledge and ideas. For Eliot, fiction enabled the consideration of life'in its highest complexity', and had the capacity not merely to elicit, but actually to create, moral sentiment by surprising readers into the recognition of realities other than their own.In this new study, Pauline Nestor offers a challenging reassessment of Eliot's contribution to the critical debates, both of her age and of her own era. In particular, she examines the author's literary expolration of ethics, especially in relation to the negotiation of difference. Nestor argues compellingly that, through a reading of their sophisticated drama of otherness, Eliot's novels can be seen as freshly relevant to contemporary theoretical debates in feminism, moral philosophy, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis.Covering the writer's complete body of major fiction, this is an indispensable voume for anyone studying the work of one of the most important and influential novelists of the nineteenth century.

Early Modern Metaphysical Literature illuminates now-obscured aspects of cultural negotiation and denaturalization germane to numerous Metaphysical texts. Examining poetry and prose by Donne, Marvell, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Edward Herbert, this book challenges readers to recognize the provocative strangeness of these writings in their original contexts and today.

Combining analysis of Victorian literature and culture with forceful theoretical argument, The Powers of Distance examines the progressive potential of those forms of cultivated detachment associated with Enlightenment and modern thought. Amanda Anderson explores a range of practices in nineteenth-century British culture, including methods of objectivity in social science, practices of omniscience in artistic realism, and the complex forms of affiliation in Victorian cosmopolitanism. Anderson demonstrates that many writers--including George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde--thoughtfully address the challenging moral questions that attend stances of detachment. In so doing, she offers a revisionist account of Victorian culture and a tempered defense of detachment as an ongoing practice and aspiration. The Powers of Distance illuminates its historical object of study and provides a powerful example for its theoretical argument, showing that an ideal of critical detachment underlies the ironic modes of modernism and postmodernism as well as the tradition of Enlightenment thought and critical theory. Its broad understanding of detachment and cultivated distance, together with its focused historical analysis, will appeal to theorists and critics across the humanities, particularly those working in literary and cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonialism. Original in scope and thesis, this book constitutes a major contribution to literary history and contemporary theory.

As powerful, pointed imitation, cultural mimesis can effect inclusion in a polity, threaten state legitimacy, or undo the originality upon which such legitimacy is based. In Mimesis and Empire, first published in 2001, Barbara Fuchs explores the intricate dynamics of imitation and contradistinction among early modern European powers in literary and historiographical texts from sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain, Italy, England and the New World. The book considers a broad sweep of material, including European representations of New World subjects and of Islam, both portrayed as'other'in contemporary texts. It supplements the transatlantic perspective on early modern imperialism with an awareness of the situation in the Mediterranean and considers problems of reading and literary transmission; imperial ideology and colonial identities; counterfeits and forgery; and piracy.

In James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, first published in 2001, a leading scholar approaches the entire Joycean canon through the concept of'egoism'. This concept, Jean-Michel Rabaté argues, runs throughout Joyce's work, and involves and incorporates its opposite,'hospitality', a term Rabaté understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to'the other'. For Rabaté both concepts emerge from the fact that Joyce published crucial texts in the London based review The Egoist and later moved on to forge strong ties with the international Paris avant-garde. Rabaté examines the theoretical debates surrounding these connections, linking Joyce's engagement with Irish politics with the aesthetic aspects of his texts. Through egoism, he shows, Joyce defined a literary sensibility founded on negation; through hospitality, Joyce postulated the creation of a new, utopian readership. Rabaté explores Joyce's complex negotiation between these two poles in a study of interest to all Joyceans and scholars of modernism.

This volume fulfills the author's career-long reflections on radical otherness in literature. J. Hillis Miller investigates otherness through ten nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors: Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. From the exquisite close readings for which he is celebrated, Miller reaps a capacious understanding of otherness--one reachable not through theory but through literature itself. Otherness has wide valence in contemporary literary and cultural studies and is often understood as a misconception by hegemonic groups of subaltern ones. In a pleasing counter to this, Others conceives of otherness as something that inhabits sameness. Instances of the''wholly other''within the familiar include your sense of self or your beloved, your sense of your culture as such, or your experience of literary, theoretical, and philosophical works that belong to your own culture--works that are themselves haunted by otherness. Though Others begins and ends with chapters on theorists, the testimony they offer about otherness is not taken as more compelling than that of such literary works as Dicken's Our Mutual Friend, Conrad's''The Secret Sharer,''Yeats's''Cold Heaven,''or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Otherness, as this book finds it in the writers read, is not an abstract concept. It is an elusive feature of specific verbal constructs, different in each case. It can be glimpsed only through close readings that respect this diversity, as the plural in the title--Others--indicates. We perceive otherness in the way that the unseen--and the characters'emotional responses to it--ripples the conservative ideological surface of Howard's End. We sense it as chaos in Schlegel's radical concept of irony. And we gaze at it in the multiple personifications of Heart of Darkness. Each testifies in its own way to the richness and tangible weight of an otherness close at hand.

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.Significantly, notes Browder, these ersatz autobiographies have tended to appear at flashpoints in American history: in the decades before the Civil War, when immigration laws and laws regarding Native Americans were changing in the 1920s, and during the civil rights era, for example. Examining the creation and reception of such works from the 1830s through the 1990s--against a background ranging from the abolition movement and Wild West shows to more recent controversies surrounding blackface performance and jazz music--Browder uncovers their surprising influence in shaping American notions of identity.

The turn of the last century, amid the excesses of the Gilded Age, variety became a key notion for Americans—a sign of national progress and development, reassurance that the modern nation would not fall into monotonous dullness or disorderly chaos. Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues this idea through the works of a wide range of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety. Exploring cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William James, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland, and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions of modern Americanism.Bramen's innovation is to look at the debates of a century ago that established diversity as the distinctive feature of U.S. culture. In the late-nineteenth-century conception, which emphasized the openness of variety while at the same time acknowledging its limits, she finds a useful corrective to the contemporary tendency to celebrate the United States as a postmodern melange or a carnivalesque utopia of hybridity and difference.

Frank O'Hara's poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the fifties and early sixties. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism and race riots. Hazel Smith suggests that the location and dislocation of the cityscape creates ‘hyperscapes'in the poetry of Frank O'Hara. The hyperscape is a postmodern site characterised by difference, breaking down unified concepts of text, city, subject and art, and remoulding them into new textual, subjective and political spaces. This book theorises the process of disruption and re-figuration which constitutes the hyperscape, and celebrates its radicality.

Explores alternatives to the gender binary in twentieth-century women's fiction.In 1929, Virginia Woolf used the phrase “other sexes” to point out the dire need to expand our way of thinking about sexual difference. The fiction studied here does just that, by sketching the contours of a world where genders, sexes, and sexualities proliferate and multiply.Focusing on a selection of novels by Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Hauser, and Jeanette Winterson—novels that cross conventional boundaries between British and American, modern and postmodern, canonical and non-canonical—Andrea L. Harris argues that there is a continuum in these novelists'investigations of gender. Taking as theoretical models Judith Butler's theory of performative gender and Luce Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental, Harris analyzes increasingly more radical challenges to the notion of two sexes and two genders throughout the twentieth century.Andrea L. Harris,/b> is Associate Professor of English at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania.

A monster lurks at the heart of medieval identity, and this book seeks him out. Reading a set of medieval texts in which giants and dismemberment figure prominently, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings a critical psychoanalytic perspective to bear on the question of identity formation-particularly masculine identity-in narrative representation. The giant emerges here as an intimate stranger, a monster who stands at the limits of selfhood. Arguing that in the romance tradition of late fourteenth-century England, identity is inscribed on sexed bodies only through the agency of a monster, Cohen looks at the giant as the masculine body writ large. In the giant he sees an uncanny figure, absolutely other and curiously familiar, that serves to define the boundaries of masculine embodiment. Philosophically compelling, the book is also a philologically rigorous inquiry into the phenomenon of giants and giant-slaying in various texts from the Anglo-Saxon period to late Middle English, including Beowulf, Chrétien de Troyes's The Knight and the Lion, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, several works by Chaucer, Sir Gowther, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and more. A significant contribution to our understanding of medieval culture, Of Giants also provides surprising insights into questions about the psychosocial work of representation in its key location for the individual: the construction of gender and the social formation of the boundaries of gender identification. It will engage students of the Middle Ages as well as those interested in discourses of the body, social identity, and the grotesque. ISBN 0-8166-3216-2 Cloth £00.00 $47.95xx ISBN 0-8166-3217-0 Paper £00.00 $18.95x 240 Pages 5 black-and-white photos 5 7/8 x 9 May Medieval Cultures Series, volume 17 Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfield in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Their particular inflection of modernism is interpreted through their shared experience as `threshold people', familiar with the liminal, for each of them a zone of transition and habitation. Writing at a time when the First World War and changing attitudes to empire problematized boundaries and definitions of foreignness, we see how the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments of disorienting suspension in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing.