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Most would agree that American culture in the 1980s differed dramatically from that of the 1960s. Yet the 1970s is still thought of as a cultural wasteland. This text debunks this notion by examining a wide range of political and cultural phenomena.

Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated social groups as well as literary works themselves, works both outside and within the traditional canon. This book is an effort to recover those lost voices. Engaging New Historicist, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and other literary practices, this volume marks important shifts in the organizing principles and self-understanding of the field of American Studies. Originally published as a special issue of boundary 2, the essays gathered here discuss writers as diverse as Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Melville, W. D. Howells, Henry James, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mark Twain, plus the historical figure John Brown. Two major sections devoted to the theory of romance and to cultural-historical analyses emphasize the political perspective of "New Americanist" literary and cultural study.Contributors. William E. Cain, Wai-chee Dimock, Howard Horwitz, Gregory S. Jay, Steven Mailloux, John McWilliams, Susan Mizruchi, Donald E. Pease, Ivy Schweitzer, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Robert Weimann

Argues that from the late eighteeneth century through the early twentieth, American literary and political texts used the figure of the child to represent U.S. national belonging.

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history.Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

Traces the emergence of the global context within which American critical identity is formed. This book argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. It also presents several interrelated analyses.

Explores interactions between novels and advertising in the construction of subjectivity in the early part of the twentieth century.

Presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. This book develops a perspective variously historical, philosophical, and cultural by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention.

Presents the Harlem Renaissance, exploring early challenges to the idea that race is a static category. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from figures such as Henry Louis Gates Jr and Houston Baker, this book looks at the work of four fiction writers: James Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer.

Offers fresh ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. This book examines white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915 - literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film - and exposes the perverse infrastructure of whiteness.

Focuses on the role of African American folk music in Renaissance aesthetic and political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity. This book elucidates how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation in the era of the Harlem Renaissance.

Examines the formation of postmodern sensibilities and their relationship to varieties of paranoia that have been seen as widespread. This book argues that paranoia on the broadly cultural level is essentially a narrative process in which history and postmodern identity are negotiated simultaneously.

Presents the study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. This title appreciates and analyses the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory.

Explores the creation of the Pacific Rim in the American imagination and how the concept has been adapted and resisted in Hawai'i, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. This title draws on theories of postmodernism, transnationality, and post-Marxist geography to contribute to the discussion of what constitutes 'global' and 'local'.

Examines constructions of racial identity through the exploration of passing narratives including forties jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow's memoir Really the Blues

Suitable for students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, this book presents an exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture.

During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University's commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life.

Demonstrates that Asian American male and female writers engage different strategies in the struggle to adapt, reflecting their particular, gender-based relationships to immigration, work, and cultural representation.

Examines three authors who have influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work, this title illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.

Challenges cliches about race and gender while looking at current debates about multiculturalism and difference while simultaneously exposing the ways in which white racial supremacy has been reconfigured since the institutional demise of segregation

Examines the connection between American pragmatism and literary modernism by focusing on the concept of transition as a theme common to both movements. This book illuminates the poetic imperatives of pragmatism by tracing the ways in which Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens capture the moment of transition.

Offers a revaluation of American literature and culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, and provides a context for understanding debates about America's relation to the rest of the world. Ranging over history, politics, philosophy, and literature, this work contributes to debates about utopian thought, globalisation, and American literature.

Published in 1994, this is a paperback edition edition of a study of the life and writings of literary pioneer, Lydia Maria Child. Her writing made and impact on American life as she addressed the issues of her time: slavery, women's rights, treatm

Explores the relationship between gender, race, and nation by tracing developing ideals of citizenship in the United States from the Revolutionary War through the 1850s. This book shows how this ideal has simultaneously privileged and oppressed white men. It is suitable for those studying early national culture, and race and gender issues.

Offers a vision of Henry James as a social critic whose later works can be read as rich with homo-erotic suggestiveness. Drawing from work in queer and feminist theory, this book argues that the most fruitful approach to James is one that ignores the elitist portrait of the formalist master.

Focusing on the commonalties revealed in their shared language and colonial history, the author examines the work of six writers who, while artistically distinct and geographically scattered, share complex sensibilities regarding their own relationship to France and the French language.

Offers a major reassessment of the work of Herman Melville, a definitive history of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, and a provocative contribution to postcolonial theory. This title focuses on the representations of cannibalism in three of Melville's key texts-Typee, Moby-Dick, and "Benito Cereno."

Explores how photographs have been and are used to construct versions of history and examines how photographic representations of otherness often tell stories about the self. This book exhibits the work of American women; tells their absorbing stories; and discusses representations of North American Indians, African Americans,and the migrant poor.

Unlike studies of 19th-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, this book shows the sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America. It also revises the terms of debate on 19th-century literature, history, and gender studies.

A study of the pragmatism of Emerson, James, and Peirce and its relevance for the neopragmatism of thinkers like Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Cornel West. In offering neopragmatism, a theory of the mind taken from Emerson, James, and Peirce, this book suggests that the neopragmatists' arguments can be sharpened across a variety of disciplines.