Contemporary Historical Fiction Exceptionalism And Community

Author : Susan Strehle
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 303055466X
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contemporary Historical Fiction, Exceptionalism and Community written by Susan Strehle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-19 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes a significant group of contemporary historical fictions that represent damaging, even catastrophic times for people and communities; written “after the wreck,” they recall instructive pasts. The novels chronicle wars, slavery, racism, child abuse and genocide; they reveal damages that ensue when nations claim an exalted, exceptionalist identity and violate the human rights of their Others. In sympathy with the exiled, writers of these contemporary historical fictions create alternative communities on the state’s outer fringes. These fictive communities include where the state excludes; they foreground relations of debt and obligation to the group in place of individualism, competition and private property. Rather than assimilating members to a single identity with a unified set of views, the communities open multiple possibilities for belonging. Analyzing novels from Britain, Australia and the U.S., along with additional transnational examples, Susan Strehle explores the political vision animating some contemporary historical fictions.

Author : Corinna Assmann
Publisher : Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3823395734
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative: Promoting Positive Change written by Corinna Assmann and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives - this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to actualize and further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning's eminent scholarship over the past decades. Engaging with her formative interdisciplinary work, the volume seeks to explore potentials of change through the transformative power of literature and narrative - to be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today's world. The book is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.

Author : Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476687153
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Edwidge Danticat written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-05-23 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comet in the mounting firmament of third-world, non-white, female writers, Edwidge Danticat stands apart. An accomplished trilingual children's and YA author, she is also an activist, op-ed and cinema writer, and keynote speaker. Much of her work introduces the world to the cultural uniqueness of Haiti, the first black republic, and the elements of African heritage, language, and Vodou that continue to color all aspects of the island's art and self-expression. This companion provides an in-depth look into the world and writings of Danticat through A-Z entries. These entries cover both her works and the prevalent themes of her writing, including colonialism, slavery, superstition, adaptation, dreams and coming of age. It also provides a biography of Danticat, a list of 32 aphorisms from her fiction, a guide to the names and histories of the real places in her fiction, lesson planning aids, and a robust glossary offering translations and definitions for the many Creole, French, Japanese, Latin, Spanish, and Taino terms in Danticat's writing.

Author : Kathy Knapp
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 160938251X
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Unexceptionalism written by Kathy Knapp and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Unexceptionalism examines a constellation of post-9/11 novels that revolve around white middle-class male suburbanites, thus following a tradition established by writers such as John Updike and John Cheever. Focusing closely on recent works by Richard Ford, Chang-Rae Lee, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, Anne Tyler, Gish Jen, A. M. Homes, and others, Kathy Knapp demonstrates that these authors revisit this well-trod turf and revive the familiar everyman character in order to reconsider and reshape American middle-class experience in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and their ongoing aftermath. The novels in question all take place in the sprawling terrain that stretches out beyond the Twin Towers—the postwar suburbs that since the end of World War II have served, like the Twin Towers themselves, as a powerful advertisement of dominance to people around the globe, by projecting an image of prosperity and family values. These suburban tales and their everyman protagonists grapple, however indirectly, with the implications of the apparent decline of the economic, geopolitical, and moral authority of the United States. In the context of perceived decay and diminishing influence, these novels actively counteract the narrative of American exceptionalism frequently peddled in the wake of 9/11. If suburban fiction has historically been faulted for its limited vision, this newest iteration has developed a depth of field that self-consciously folds the personal into the political, encompasses the have-nots along with the haves, and takes in the past when it imagines the future, all in order to forge a community of readers who are now accountable to the larger world. American Unexceptionalism traces the trajectory by which recent suburban fiction overturns the values of individualism, private property ownership, and competition that originally provided its foundation. In doing so, the novels examined here offer readers new and flexible ways to imagine being and belonging in a setting no longer characterized by stasis, but by flux.

Author : David Coughlan
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137410248
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction written by David Coughlan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines representations of the specter in American twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. David Coughlan’s innovative structure has chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, particularly within the context of his 1993 text, Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter—that is, without ghost writing.

Author : Stacey Olster
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108394094
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction written by Stacey Olster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction explores fiction written over the last thirty years in the context of the profound political, historical, and cultural changes that have distinguished the contemporary period. Focusing on both established and emerging writers - and with chapters devoted to the American historical novel, regional realism, the American political novel, the end of the Cold War and globalization, 9/11, borderlands and border identities, race, and the legacy of postmodern aesthetics - this Introduction locates contemporary American fiction at the intersection of a specific time and long-standing traditions. In the process, it investigates the entire concept of what constitutes an “American” author while exploring the vexed, yet resilient, nature of what the concept of home has come to signify in so much writing today. This wide-ranging study will be invaluable to students, instructors, and general readers alike.

Author : M. Gauthier
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230337821
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction written by M. Gauthier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how a political and cultural dynamic of amnesia and truth telling shapes literary constructions of history. Gauthier focuses on the works of Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Bharati Mukherjee, and Julie Otsuka.

Author : Seymour Martin Lipset
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393316148
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Exceptionalism written by Seymour Martin Lipset and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1996 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is America unique? One of our major political analysts explores the deeply held but often unarticulated beliefs that shape the American creed. "(A) magisterial attempt to distill a lifetime of learning about America into a persuasive brief . . . (by) the dean of American political sociologists".--Carlin Romano, "Boston Globe".

Author : Steven Salaita
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 081565104X
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modern Arab American Fiction written by Steven Salaita and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the spectrum of American literary traditions, Arab American literature is relatively new. Writing produced by Americans of Arab origin is mainly a product of the twentieth century and only started to flourish in the past thirty years. While this young but thriving literature varies widely in content and style, it emerges from a common community and within a specific historical, political, and cultural context. In Modern Arab American Fiction, Salaita maps out the landscape of this genre as he details rather than defines the last century of Arab American fiction. Exploring the works of such best-selling authors as Rabih Alameddine, Mohja Kahf, Laila Halaby, Diana Abu-Jaber, Alicia Erian, and Randa Jarrar, Salaita highlights the development of each author’s writing and how each has influenced Arab American fiction. He examines common themes including the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, the representation and practice of Islam in the United States, social issues such as gender and national identity in Arab cultures, and the various identities that come with being Arab American. Combining the accessibility of a primer with in-depth critical analysis, Modern Arab American Fiction is suitable for a broad audience, those unfamiliar with the subject area, as well as scholars of the literature.

Author : Kim Wilson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136666257
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Re-visioning Historical Fiction for Young Readers written by Kim Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is concerned with how readers are positioned to interpret the past in historical fiction for children and young adults. Looking at literature published within the last thirty to forty years, Wilson identifies and explores a prevalent trend for re-visioning and rewriting the past according to modern social and political ideological assumptions. Fiction within this genre, while concerned with the past at the level of content, is additionally concerned with present views of that historical past because of the future to which it is moving. Specific areas of discussion include the identification of a new sub-genre: Living history fiction, stories of Joan of Arc, historical fiction featuring agentic females, the very popular Scholastic Press historical journal series, fictions of war, and historical fiction featuring multicultural discourses. Wilson observes specific traits in historical fiction written for children — most notably how the notion of positive progress into the future is nuanced differently in this literature in which the concept of progress from the past is inextricably linked to the protagonist’s potential for agency and the realization of subjectivity. The genre consistently manifests a concern with identity construction that in turn informs and influences how a metanarrative of positive progress is played out. This book engages in a discussion of the functionality of the past within the genre and offers an interpretative frame for the sifting out of the present from the past in historical fiction for young readers.