"It is often thought that the numerous contradictory perspectives in Margaret Cavendish's writings demonstrate her inability to reconcile her feminism with her conservative, royalist politics. In this book Lisa Walters challenges this view and demonstrates that Cavendish's ideas…
White men still hold most of the political and economic cards in the United States; yet stories about wounded and traumatized men dominate popular culture. Why are white men jumping on the victim bandwagon? Examining novels by Philip Roth, John Updike, James Dickey, John Irving,…
"Theories of power have always been intertwined with theories of fatherhood: paternity is the oldest and most persistent metaphor of benign, legitimate rule. The paternal trope gains its strength from its integration of law, body, and affect--in the affirmative model of fatherho…
Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time--whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of bei…
The place of the Middle East in European heterosexual fantasy is well documented in the works of Edward Said and others, yet few have considered the male Anglo-European (and, later, American) writers, artists, travelers, and thinkers compelled to represent what, to their eyes, s…
Digital and electronic technologies that act as extensions of our bodies and minds are changing the way we live, think, act, and write. Some welcome these developments for bringing humans closer to unified consciousness and eternal life. Others worry invasive globalized technolo…
Though he lived mostly in rural South Taiwan, Zhong Lihe (1915?1960) spent several years in Manchuria and Peking, moving among an eclectic mix of ethnicities, classes, and cultures. His fictional portraits unfold on Japanese battlefields and in Peking slums, as well as in the re…
In Christianity, the body is a potentially transformative vehicle, and the writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of her theological milieu. This study links the embodied po…
Sonali Perera expands the discourse on working-class fiction by considering a range of international, noncanonical texts, identifying textual, political, and historical linkages overlooked by Eurocentric scholarship. Her readings connect the literary radicalism of the 1930s to t…