This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature, where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide, and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of the American dramatic adaptations of Frank’s Diary in the 1950s, and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power. At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that these texts unquestioningly perpetuate the problems with the adaptations. This is not true. This book examines how American authors represent Frank in order to negotiate difficult questions relating to representation of the Holocaust in America, and in order to consider gender, coming of age, and forms of inequality in American culture in various historical moments; and of course, to consider the ways Frank herself is represented in America. This book argues that the most compelling representations of Frank in American literature are alert to their own limitations, and may caution against making Frank a universal symbol of goodness or setting up too easy identifications with her. It will be of great interest to researchers and students of Frank, the Holocaust in American fiction and culture, gender studies, life writing, young adult fiction, and ethics.

A timeless story rediscovered by each new generation, The Diary of a Young Girl stands without peer. This graphic edition remains faithful to the original, while the stunning illustrations interpret and add layers of visual meaning and immediacy to this classic work of Holocaust literature. “[A] stunning, haunting work of art..."—The New York Times Book Review For both young readers and adults The Diary continues to capture the remarkable spirit of Anne Frank, who for a time survived the worst horror the modern world has seen—and who remained triumphantly and heartbreakingly human throughout her ordeal. Includes extensive quotations directly from the definitive edition; adapted by Ari Folman, illustrated by David Polonsky, and authorized by the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel.

This new collection examines important US historical fiction published since 2000. Exploring historical novels by established American writers such as Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Susan Choi, and George Saunders, the book also includes chapters on first-time novelists. Individual essays in 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past tackle prominent and provocative new novels, for example, recent Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction by Anthony Doerr, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colson Whitehead. Interrogating such key themes as war, race, sexuality, trauma and childhood; notions of genre and periodization; and recent theorizations of historical fiction, scholars from the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland analyze an emerging canon of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse range of major American writers.

Written by leading scholars on Philip Roth from around the globe, this book offers new insight into the various contexts that inform his body of work. It opens with an overview of Roth's life and literary influences, before turning to important critical, geographical, theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts. It closes with focused meditations on the various iterations of Roth's legacy, from the screen to international translations of his work to his signature stylistic imprint on American letters. Together, all of these chapters reveal Roth's range as a writer, as he interrogates American national identity and history, and explores the dimensions of the individual self.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering dynamic new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and art festivals, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, Goth/ic on TV and film, new trends like Steampunk, well-known icons Batman and Lady Gaga, and theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism.

Racial passing has fascinated thousands of American readers since the end of the nineteenth century. However, the phenomenon of Jews passing as gentiles has been all but overlooked. This book examines forgotten novels depicting Jewish Americans masquerading as gentiles. Exploring two "waves" of publications of this subgenre—in the 1940s-1950s and 1990s-2000s—this book raises questions about the perceptions of Jewish difference during these periods.Looking at issues such as Whiteness, Americanness, gender, and race, it traces the changes in the representation of Jewish identity during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Ohad Reznick’s Imagined Non-Jews is an important intervention in the scholarship on the literature of passing. This book also makes a significant contribution to Jewish American literary studies through thoughtful close readings of texts from the 1940s and 1950s, many of them little-known today, as well as multi-ethnic American fiction from the turn-of-the-21st-century, all of them featuring characters who conceal their Jewishness in order to pass for gentile. —Lori Harrison-Kahan, Boston College, author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary

How I Lost My Mother is a deeply felt account of the relationship between a mother and son, and an exploration of what care for the dying means in contemporary society The book is emotionally complex – funny, sad and angry – but above all, heartfelt and honest. It speaks boldly of challenges faced by all of us, challenges which are often not spoken about and hidden, but which deserve urgent attention. This is first and foremost a work of the heart, a reflection on what relationships mean and should mean. There is much in the book about relationships of care and exploitation in southern Africa, and about white Jewish identity in an African context. But despite the specific and absorbing references to places and contexts, the book offers a broader, more universal view. All parents of adult children, and all adults who have parents alive, or have lost their parents, will find much in this book to make them laugh, cry, think and feel.

New Visibilities: Victimhood and Other Forms of Vulnerability in 21st-century Fiction (eds. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. All contributions are original.

To what extent can the leaky, porous bodies in Philip Roth's fiction be read as symbols of resistance against anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and racism? Philip Roth and the Body questions the symbolic functionality of the corporeal in Roth's main works of fiction, particularly as sites of gender and racial identification for Roth's protagonists. In his recurrent employment of the abject, Roth throws into doubt the body as a coherent, stable entity, undermining his male characters' determinations of gendered and racial otherness through his porously unstable bodies. Joshua Lander draws on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and his theory of the 'conceptual Jew' to argue that Roth's fiction is yoked together by a shared interest in how anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish difference – centered around the body – pervasively inform American Jewish identities. The book also contends that Roth resists American white nationalism by transforming the body's ejaculations, excretions, secretions, and expulsions into symbols of difference that he repeatedly ties to Jewishness. At the same time, this study highlights how Roth's novels, through his focus on Jewish men, risk the reification of America's sexist social structures as they intersect with the very racism Roth seeks to undermine. Philip Roth and the Body's examination of how bodies in Roth's fiction are entities troubled within his prose renews conversations about whose bodies matter, both in Roth studies and in the context of America's racial and social politics.

Critiquing the politics and dynamics of the transcultural poetics of reading literature, this book demonstrates an ambitious understanding of the concept of the poet across a wide range of traditions – Anglo-American, German, French, Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit, Bengali, Urdu – and philosophies of creativity that are rarely studied side by side. Ghosh carves out unexplored spaces of negotiation and intersections between literature, aesthetics and philosophy. The book demonstrates an original method of ‘global comparison’ that displaces the relatively staid and historicist categories that have underpinned comparative literature approaches so far, since they rarely dare stray beyond issues of influence and schools, or new 'world literature' approaches that affirm cosmopolitanism and transnationalism as overarching themes. Going beyond comparatism and reformulating the chronological patterns of reading, this bold book introduces new methodologies of reading literature to configure the concept of the poet from Philip Sidney to T. S Eliot, reading the notion of the poet through completely new theoretical and epistemic triggers. Commonly known texts and sometimes well-circulated ideas are subjected to refreshing reading in what the author calls the ‘transcultural now’ and (in)fusionised transpoetical matrices. By moving between theories of poetry and literature that come from widely separated times, contexts, and cultures, this book shows the relevance of canonical texts to a theory of the future as marked by post-global concerns.