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When Henry Luce announced in 1941 that we were living in the “American century,” he believed that the international popularity of American culture made the world favorable to U.S. interests. Now, in the digital twenty-first century, the American century has been superseded, as American movies, music, video games, and television shows are received, understood, and transformed. How do we make sense of this shift? Building on a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, Brian T. Edwards maps new routes of cultural exchange that are innovative, accelerated, and full of diversions. Shaped by the digital revolution, these paths are entwined with the growing fragility of American “soft” power. They indicate an era after the American century, in which popular American products and phenomena—such as comic books, teen romances, social-networking sites, and ways of expressing sexuality—are stripped of their associations with the United States and recast in very different forms. Arguing against those who talk about a world in which American culture is merely replicated or appropriated, Edwards focuses on creative moments of uptake, in which Arabs and Iranians make something unexpected. He argues that these products do more than extend the reach of the original. They reflect a world in which culture endlessly circulates and gathers new meanings.

Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on the very basis of dissensus. In a rare comparison of these authors’ writings, Algerian Imprints shows how Cixous and Djebar consistently reclaim for ethical and political purposes the demarcations and dislocations emphasized in their fictions. Their works affirm the chance for thinking afforded by marginalization and exclusion and delineate political ways of preserving a space for difference informed by expropriation and nonbelonging. Cixous’s inquiry is steeped in her formative encounter with the grudging integration of the Jews in French Algeria, while Djebar’s narratives concern the colonial separation of “French” and “Arab,” self and other. Yet both authors elaborate strategies to address inequality and injustice without resorting to tropes of victimization, challenging and transforming the understanding of the history and legacy of colonized space.

Rethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, this book showcases the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, and conceptions of identity into their critiques. Chapters combine close readings of individual works and authors with more theoretical discussions of aesthetic theory and its relation to American literature. The introduction argues that aesthetics never left American literary critique. Instead, it casts the current “return to aesthetics” as the natural consequence of shortcomings in deconstruction and new historicism, which led to a reconfiguration of aesthetics. Subsequent chapters demonstrate the value and versatility of aesthetic considerations in literature, from eighteenth-century poetry to twentieth-century popular music. Organized into four groups—politics, form, gender, and theory—the chapters revisit the canonical works of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane, introduce the overlooked texts of Constance Fenimore Woolson and Earl Lind, and unpack the complexities of the music of The Carpenters. Deeply rooted in an American context, the book explores literature's aesthetic dimensions in connection to American liberty and the formation of political selfhood.

In much of modern fiction, it is the clothes that make the character. Garments embody personal and national histories. They convey wealth, status, aspiration, and morality (or a lack thereof). They suggest where characters have been and where they might be headed, as well as whether or not they are aware of their fate. This study explores the agency of fashion in modern literature. Celia Marshik’s study combines close readings of modernist and middlebrow works, a history of Britain in the early twentieth century, and the insights of thing theory. She focuses on four distinct categories of modern clothing: the evening gown, the mackintosh, the fancy dress costume, and secondhand attire. In their use of these clothes, we see authors negotiate shifting gender roles, weigh the value of individuality during national conflict, work through mortality, and depict changing class structures. Marshik’s dynamic comparisons put Ulysses in conversation with Rebecca, Punch cartoons, articles in Vogue, and letters from consumers, illuminating opinions about specific garments and a widespread anxiety that people were no more than what they wore. Throughout her readings, Marshik emphasizes the persistent animation of clothing—and objectification of individuals—in early-twentieth-century literature and society. She argues that while artists and intellectuals celebrated the ability of modern individuals to remake themselves, a range of literary works and popular publications points to a lingering anxiety about how political, social, and economic conditions continued to constrain the individual.

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous—and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.

Challenging clichés of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists in the tumultuous century between the 1860s and the 1960s.Reed combines extensive archival research; analysis of art, architecture, and literature; the insights of queer theory; and an appreciation of irony to explore the East-West encounter through three revealing artistic milieus: the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes of late-nineteenth-century Paris; collectors and curators in turn-of-the-century Boston; and the mid-twentieth-century circles of artists associated with Seattle’s Mark Tobey. The result is a groundbreaking integration of well-known and forgotten episodes and personalities that illuminates how Japanese aesthetics were used to challenge Western gender conventions. These disruptive effects are sustained in Reed’s analysis, which undermines conventional scholarly investments in the heroism of avant-garde accomplishment and ideals of cultural authenticity.

This book defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era. It does this through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among others. It calls attention to fresh innovations in form, voice, perspective, and representation, and also affirms the lead role played by Latin American authors in reshaping world literature. The book focuses on post-1989 Latin American novels and their representation of globalization. It considers the narrative techniques and aesthetic choices Latin American authors make to assimilate the conflicting forces at work in our increasingly interconnected world. It challenges the assumption that globalization leads to cultural homogenization, and identifies the rich textual strategies that estrange and re-mediate power relations both within literary canons and across global cultural hegemonies. It shines a light on the unique, avant-garde phenomena that animate these works, such as modelling literary circuits after the dynamics of the art world, imagining counterfactual “Nazi” histories, exposing the limits of escapist narratives and formulating textual forms that resist worldwide literary consumerism. These experiments help reconfigure received ideas about global culture and advance new, creative articulations of world consciousness.

This book looks at the history and usage of Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections that exist between languages, scripts, medial expressions, and cultural and national identities. It shows how new communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. It describes how, in recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and in other parts of the West. Through a study of intercultural representations, exchanges and tensions, the book focuses on the concrete “scripting” of identity and alterity. It advances a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and provides a critique of the articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. Overall, it shows how Chinese writing can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.

In Chimeras of Form, Aarthi Vadde vividly illustrates how modernist and contemporary writers reimagine the nation and internationalism in a period defined by globalization. She explains how Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith use modernist literary forms to develop ideas of international belonging sensitive to the afterlife of empire. In doing so, she shows how this wide-ranging group of authors challenged traditional expectations of aesthetic form, shaping how their readers understand the cohesion and interrelation of political communities. Drawing on her close readings of individual texts and on literary, postcolonial, and cosmopolitical theory, Vadde examines how modernist formal experiments take part in debates about transnational interdependence and social obligation. She reads Joyce's use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie, and demonstrates how the "plotless" works of Claude McKay upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of the contemporary writers Zadie Smith and Shailja Patel shows how present-day issues relating to migration, displacement, and economic inequality link modernist and postcolonial traditions of literature. Vadde brings these traditions together to reveal the dual nature of internationalism as an aspiration, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse vital to understanding our present moment.

This book reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, and shows that this had profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity. It draws on interviews, rare archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and the Voice of America. The book starts by showing how European intellectuals in the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. It then details how American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. It shows how they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. The book argues that, by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. It shows how they remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. It also documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.

This book provides an alternative history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. It draws on the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa. In this way it broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and provides a nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange. It shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and helped shape the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early African independence movements (galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences), the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, the book introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Travelling from the twelfth century to today, it concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggles to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.

This book analyzes ten books in which children feature as critical characters and assesses the ways the children in these novels have been used to explore and evade large social, psychological and moral problems. The novels the book explores portray children so vividly that their names are instantly recognizable. The book traces the 130-year evolution of these iconic child characters, moving from Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip in Great Expectations to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; from Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw to Peter Pan and his modern American descendant, Holden Caulfield; and finally to Lolita and Alexander Portnoy. The book highlights the fact that many classic English and American novels focus on children and adolescents not as colorful minor characters but as the intense center of attention. It shows that, despite many differences of style, setting, and structure, all these novels enlist a particular child's story as part of a larger cultural narrative. The book demonstrates the way these great novels work, how they spring to life from their details and how they both invite and resist interpretation and provoke rereading. It conveys the variety and continued vitality of these books as they shift from Victorian moral allegory to New York comic psychoanalytic monologue, from a child who is an agent of redemption to one who is a narcissistic prisoner of guilt and proud rage.

This anthology asks thirty-six leading literary and cultural critics to elaborate on the nature of their profession. These credos boldly defend the function of criticism in contemporary society and showcase its vitality in the era after theory. Chapters address literature and politics, with some focusing on the sorry state of higher education and others concentrating on teaching and the fate of the humanities. All reflect the critics' personal, particular experiences. Deeply personal and engaging, these stories move, amuse, and inspire, ultimately encouraging the reader to develop his or her own critical credo with which to approach the world. Reflecting on the past, looking forward to the future, and committed to the power of productive critical thought, this book proves the value of criticism for today's skeptical audiences.

What do we value? Why do we value it? And in a neoliberal age, can morality ever displace money as the primary means of defining value? These are the questions that drove David Foster Wallace, a writer widely credited with changing the face of contemporary fiction and moving it beyond an emotionless postmodern irony. Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and saw the world through the lens of value's many hidden and untapped meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace's fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies. As Severs demonstrates, the concept of value occupied the intersection of Wallace's major interests: economics, work, metaphysics, mathematics, and morality. Severs ranges from the Great Depression and the New Deal to the realms of finance, insurance, and taxation to detail Wallace's quest for balance and grace in a world of excess and entropy. Wallace showed characters struggling to place two feet on the ground and restlessly sought to "balance the books" of a chaotic culture. Explaining why Wallace's work has galvanized a new phase in contemporary global literature, Severs draws connections to key Wallace forerunners Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, as well as his successors—including Dave Eggers, Teddy Wayne, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith—interpreting Wallace's legacy in terms of finance, the gift, and office life.

This book traces the development of “Ecosickness fiction” through an assessment of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs. It describes how the 1970s brought about a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impacts that environmental crisis can have on human beings. It shows that at this time, as efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. It explains that this “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between environmental threats and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. The book establishes the understanding that we cannot comprehend environmental and medical dilemmas through data alone. It argues that we must call on the, sometimes surprising, emotions that literary metaphors, tropes, and narratives deploy. In chapters on David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, the book shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it. The book builds connections between contemporary literature, ecocriticism, affect studies, and the medical humanities. It also positions ecosickness fiction relative to emergent forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. It models an approach to contemporary fiction as a laboratory for affective changes that spark or squelch ethical projects.

This book profiles Eric Walrond (1898–1966), the writer, journalist, and critic, whose short story collection, Tropic Death, was one of the first efforts by a black author to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction. It restores Walrond to his proper place as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, situates Tropic Death within the author's broader corpus, and positions the work as a catalyst and driving force behind the New Negro literary movement in America. The book follows Walrond from the West Indies to Panama, New York, France, and finally England. It recounts his relationships with New Negro authors such as Countée Cullen, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Gwendolyn Bennett, as well as the white novelist Carl Van Vechten. It also highlights Walrond's involvement with Marcus Garvey's journal Negro World and the National Urban League journal, Opportunity, and examines the writer's work for mainstream titles, including Vanity Fair. The book also shows how, in 1929, Walrond severed ties with Harlem, but did not disappear. It explains that he went on to contribute to the burgeoning anti-colonial movement and print culture centered in England and fueled by C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Caribbean expatriates.

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called “the magic pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. The Ethnic Avant-Garde draws on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an “ethnic avant-garde.” These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an “Afro-Cuban” voice; Langston Hughes’s translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway’s first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

This book casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers and shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. The book draws on a diverse range of unconventional sources, including poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives and Hallmark greeting cards. It argues that poetry, in the first half of the twentieth century, was part and parcel of American popular culture, and that it spread rapidly at that time as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. The book also shows how poetry offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs or poetry contests. Re-envisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, the book provides the reader with a better understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.

In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should “turn the reader’s and writer’s attention outwards from himself to the world.” Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism’s decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.

Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticityvindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.