In an age of globalisation, it has become increasingly difficult to characterise the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and impermeable to influences from beyond its territorial borders.
This series seeks to provide more cosmopolitan and transnational perspectives on American literature, by offering:
in-depth analyses of American writers and writing literature by internationally based scholars
critical studies that foster awareness of the ways in which American writing engages with writers and cultures north and south of its territorial boundaries, as well as with the writers and cultures across the Atlantic and Pacific.
By Will Norman
May 31, 2017
This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical ...
Edited
By Rocío Davis
May 31, 2017
This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural production, specifically literature, film, and music, examining how these serve as ways of perceiving the United States and American culture. The volume’s engagement with the reality of transnationalism focuses on material examples ...
Edited
By Tara Stubbs, Doug Haynes
March 17, 2017
This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to ...
By Ana Manzanas, Jesús Benito Sanchez
November 10, 2016
This volume examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating this ancient virtue at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring the relationship among the intersecting themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the ...
By Gesa Mackenthun
August 19, 2015
This book is a significant contribution to existing research on the themes of race and slavery in the founding literature of the United States. It extends the boundaries of existing research by locating race and slavery within a transnational and 'oceanic' framework. The author applies critical ...
By Ana Manzanas, Jesús Benito Sanchez
November 10, 2014
Thus book examines the spatial morphologies represented in a wide range of contemporary ethnic American literary and cinematic works. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of space as a living organism, Edward Soja’s writings on the postmetropolis, Marc Augé’s notion of the non-place, Manuel ...
By Judie Newman
November 10, 2014
This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, André Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the ...
By Christopher Dowd
August 12, 2014
This book examines the development of literary constructions of Irish-American identity from the mid-nineteenth century arrival of the Famine generation through the Great Depression. It goes beyond an analysis of negative Irish stereotypes and shows how Irish characters became the site of intense ...
By Patricia Okker
November 08, 2013
Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the periodicals and communities in which they circulated. With essays on serial fiction published from the ...
By Aliki Varvogli
November 08, 2013
This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on ...
By Peter Swirski
November 13, 2012
The United States today is afflicted with political alienation, militarized violence, institutionalized poverty, and social agony. Worst of all, perhaps, it is afflicted with chronic and acute ahistoricism. America insist on ignoring the context of its present dilemmas. It insists on forgetting ...
By Peter Boxall
June 28, 2012
One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo's writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and ...