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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.
This volume argues that contemporary narratives evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss.
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.
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.
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.
Our nation began with the simple phrase, “We the People.” But who were and are “We”? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today? With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths—such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption—and reveals instead how greater security and wealth have only reinforced the independence, egalitarianism, and commitment to community that characterized our people from the earliest years. Skillfully drawing on personal stories of representative Americans, Fischer shows that affluence and social progress have allowed more people to participate fully in cultural and political life, thus broadening the category of “American” —yet at the same time what it means to be an American has retained surprising continuity with much earlier notions of American character. Firmly in the vein of such classics as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart—yet challenging many of their conclusions—Made in America takes readers beyond the simplicity of headlines and the actions of elites to show us the lives, aspirations, and emotions of ordinary Americans, from the settling of the colonies to the settling of the suburbs.
The idea that America is exceptional, whether because of its founding creed, natural abundance, or Protestant origins, has been the subject of fierce debate going back to the founding. Rather than argue for one side or the other, Volker Depkat explores the diverse ways in which Americans have described their country as exceptional. Describing how narratives of exceptionalism have never been a purely American affair, Depkat shows how, for example, European, African, and Asian immigrants projected their own dreams and nightmares onto the American screen, contributing to the intellectual construction of America. In fact, the different groups living in America have described American exceptionalism in such differing terms that there hardly ever was a shared understanding as to what these exceptional experiences were and how to interpret them. What has unified the disparate exceptionalist narratives, Depkat explains, is their insistence on America's universalist and future-oriented way of life. In engaging and lucid prose, Depkat offers general readers and students of American history an invaluable lens through which they can evaluate for themselves the merits of the many ways in which Americans have understood their country as exceptional.
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.
“Fake news existed long before Donald Trump…. What is ironic is that fake news has indeed been the only news disseminated by the rulers of U.S. empire.”—From American Exceptionalism and American Innocence According to Robert Sirvent and Danny Haiphong, Americans have been exposed to fake news throughout our history—news that slavery is a thing of the past, that we don’t live on stolen land, that wars are fought to spread freedom and democracy, that a rising tide lifts all boats, that prisons keep us safe, and that the police serve and protect. Thus, the only “news” ever reported by various channels of U.S. empire is the news of American exceptionalism and American innocence. And, as this book will hopefully show, it’s all fake. Did the U.S. really “save the world” in World War II? Should black athletes stop protesting and show more gratitude for what America has done for them? Are wars fought to spread freedom and democracy? Or is this all fake news? American Exceptionalism and American Innocence examines the stories we’re told that lead us to think that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, regardless of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, and the more than a century’s worth of imperialist war that the U.S. has wrought on the planet. Sirvent and Haiphong detail just what Captain America’s shield tells us about the pretensions of U.S. foreign policy, how Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates engage in humanitarian imperialism, and why the Broadway musical Hamilton is a monument to white supremacy.
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.