Browse by Subject: Literature

A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love--Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America's racial divide.

Looking closely at nineteenth-century texts and twentieth-century novels written by African American women about antebellum America, Resistance Reimagined highlights examples of black women’s activism within a society that spoke so much of freedom but granted it so selectively. 

Making the case that legal issues are central to James Joyce’s life and work, international experts in law and literature offer new insights into Joyce’s most important texts. They analyze Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake in light of the legal contexts of Joyce’s day.

In a daring rewrite of literary history, this volume argues that the medieval poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut was the major influence in narrative craft during the late Middle Ages and long after.   

Demonstrating that one story from James Joyce’s Dubliners is not only a turning point in that book but also a microcosm of a wide range of important Joycean influences and preoccupations, Cóilín Owens examines the dense intertextuality of “A Painful Case.” 

Beginning with Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and continuing into contemporary black women's writings, Donna Weir-Soley emphasizes the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity. Analyzing the works and characters of such writers as Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat, she reveals how these writers highlight the interplay between the spiritual and the sexual through religious symbols found in Voudoun, Santeria, Condomble, Kumina, and Hoodoo.

A Curious Peril examines the prose penned by modernist writer H.D. in the aftermath of World War II, a little-known body of work that has been neglected by scholars, and argues that the trauma H.D. experienced in London during the war profoundly changed her writing. Lara Vetter reveals a shift in these writings from classical "escapist" settings to politically aware explorations of gender, spirituality, nation, and imperialism.

From his World War I service in Italy through his transformational return visits during the decades that followed, Ernest Hemingway's Italian experiences were fundamental to his artistic development. Hemingway and Italy offers essays from top scholars, exciting new voices, and people who knew Hemingway during his Italian days, examining how his adopted homeland shaped his writing and his legacy.

This book offers a fresh look at the modernist writers, revealing how their rejection of organized religion and the colonial presence in their native countries allowed them to destabilize traditional notions of power, colonialism, and individual freedom in their texts. The result is an engaging and enlightening investigation of their writings and of the larger literary movement to which they belonged.