The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry is designed to give readers a brief but thorough introduction to the various movements, schools, and groups of American poets in the twentieth century. It will help readers to understand and analyze modern and contemporary poems. The first part of the book deals with the transition from the nineteenth-century lyric to the modernist poem, focussing on the work of major modernists such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and W. C. Williams. In the second half of the book, the focus is on groups such as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Critics, the Confessionals, and the Beats. In each chapter, discussions of the most important poems are placed in the larger context of literary, cultural, and social history.

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.

Critical introduction to the contemporary american novel focusing on contexts, key texts and criticism.

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral investigates the formation and formulation of the contemporary novel through a historical analysis of voice studies and media studies. After situating research through voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, this book examines the expressions of a multi-media vocality, examining the interactions among cultural polemics, aesthetic forms, and changing media in the twenty-first century. The novel studies shown here trace the ways in which the viral aesthetics of the contemporary novel move language out of context, recontextualizing human testimony by galvanizing mixed media forms that shape contemporary literature in our age of networks. Through readings of American authors such as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Joseph O’Neill, Michael Cunningham, and Colum McCann, the book considers how voice acts as a site where identities combine, conform, and are questioned relationally. By listening to and tracing the spoken and unspoken voices of the novel, the author identifies a politics of listening and speaking in our mediated, informational society.

Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them. Professor Kammen shows how the post-traditional popular culture that flourished after the 1880s became full-blown mass culture after World War II, in an era of unprecedented affluence and travel. He charts the influence of advertising and opinion polling; the development of standardized products, shopping centers, and mass-marketing; the separation of youth and adult culture; the gradual repudiation of the genteel tradition; and the commercialization of organized entertainment. He stresses the significance of television in the shaping of mass culture, and of consumerism in its reconfiguration over the past two decades. Focusing on our own time, Kammen discusses the use of the fluid nature of cultural taste to enlarge audiences and increase revenues, and reveals how the public role of intellectuals and cultural critics has declined as the power of corporate sponsors and promoters has risen. As a result of this diminution of cultural authority, he says, definitive pronouncements have been replaced by divergent points of view, and there is, as well, a tendency to blur fact and fiction, reality and illusion. An important commentary on the often conflicting ways Americans have understood, defined, and talked about their changing culture in the twentieth century.

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. Covers significant authors, including those neglected by history, and their works from major historical and cultural periods of the last century, including authors writing today Situates authors' works not only within their own canon but also with the historical and cultural context of the U.S. more broadly Positions primary documents after specific authors or works, allowing readers to read excerpts critically in light of the entries Examines literary movements, forms, and genres that also pay special attention to multi-ethnic and women writers

What is postmodern literary subjectivity? How to talk about it without falling in the trap of negative hyper-essentialism or being seduced by exuberant lit speak? One way out of this dilemma, as this book suggests, is via a redefinition of the concept in the context of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. By defining subjectivity as an ethically charged act of language, Levinas provides a fresh perspective on the often trivialized aspects of postmodern poetics such as referentiality and affect construction strategies. The foregrounding of the ethical dimension of those poetic elements has far-reaching consequences for how we read postmodern texts and understand postmodernism in general. Thus, to prove the benefits of the Levinasian approach, the author applies it to the work of the canonical American postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and explains the distinctly ethical character of his apparently surfictional experiments.

As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires. Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.” Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

This text argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness.