Bøger i Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century serien

[headline]Offers a literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures Is emotional truth a damaging literary and cultural ideal? The Artifice of Affect proposes that valuing affective authenticity risks creating a homogenised self, encouraged to comply only with accepted moral beliefs. Similarly, when emotional truth is the primary value of literature, literary texts too often become agents of conformity. Nowhere is this risk explored more fully than in a range of American realist texts from the Cold War to the end of the twentieth century. The works of writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Kathleen Collins, Paula Fox, Ralph Ellison and Richard Yates formulate trenchant critiques of true feeling's aesthetic and social imperatives. The arguments at the heart of this book aim to re-frame emotional processes as visceral constructions, which should not be held to the standards of static ideals of accuracy, legitimacy or veracity. [bio]Nicholas Manning is Professor of American Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut universitaire de France.

The first book to examine the historical transformations of the American Bildungsroman through the lens of region.

Analysing the ubiquity of the small town in fiction of the mid-century US South, Living Jim Crow is the first extended scholarly study to explore how authors mobilised this setting as a tool for racial resistance.

A revisionist reading of Fitzgerald's short stories through the lens of popular culture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s

Compelling analyses of the function and representation of Nature in a wide range of Cold War fiction and poetry.

A radical reinterpretation of Willa Cather's oeuvre Deploying the concepts and techniques of Body Studies, Guy J. Reynolds remaps Cather's vast and diverse range of writing from the 1890s through to 1940. His study of embodiment and narrative focuses on the senses and reads Cather as a writer at the transition from late Victorian to Modernist modes of representation. The book presents suggestive new ways of understanding her depictions of disability, male bodies and Native American culture, not to mention her narratives of whiteness and of the black body. Guy J. Reynolds is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.