Laboring bodies and the quantified self

Focusing on the relations between quantification, the body, and labor, this volume sheds light on the ways in which discourses on data collection, office work, and production are instrumental in redefining concepts of labor, including notions of immaterial and free labor in an increasingly virtua...

The song of everlasting sorrow

Set in post-World War II Shanghai, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the longtong, the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods. Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the M...

The korean vernacular story

Si Nae Park examines how the culture of Chosŏn Seoul gave rise to a new vernacular literary form (yadam), anonymously and unofficially circulating tales. She focuses on the collection Repeatedly Recited Stories of the East, which was written in a new medium in which Literary Sinitic is hybridized...

Fugitive borders

Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly enslaved men in the 1850s that defy the genre conventions of the slave narrative. Instead, they express complex, often ambivalent attitudes toward the so-called Canadian Promised Land.

How to read chinese prose

This book offers a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and its literary and cultural significance. It features more than one hundred major texts from antiquity through the Qing dynasty that exemplify major genres, styles, and forms of traditional Chinese prose.

Sebald's vision

A major new assessment of one of the most important writers of the late twentieth century and his work with history and its representation.

Marked men

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, and Pat Conroy an...

Post-apartheid criticism

South Africa’s post-apartheid narrative is one of democracy and equality—but its flaws run deep, argues Ives S. Loukson. Disclosing prejudices about whiteness, homosexuality, and democracy, he lays the foundation for post-apartheid criticism that differs from postcolonial criticism.

The social work of narrative

This book addresses the ways in which a range of representational forms have influenced and helped implement the project of human rights across the world, and seeks to show how public discourses on law and politics grow out of and are influenced by the imaginative representations of human rights....

Masks of conquest

Describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and its function as an effective form of political control

Siegfried the wrestler

Through the study of one rare, surviving colportage novel, Peter S. Fisher offers an unusual mental and visual panorama of a nearly vanished Wilhelmine world.

Running wild

The holocaust in central european literatures and cultures

Relating the Holocaust to poetic and aesthetic phenomena has often been considered taboo, as only authentic testimony, documents, or at least 'unliterary', prosaic approaches were seen as appropriate. However, from the very beginning of Holocaust literature and culture, there were tendencies towa...

Circulating jim crow

Adam McKible demonstrates how the Saturday Evening Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity.

The columbia companion to modern chinese literature

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern lite...

Midcentury suspension

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Claire Seiler argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary f...

Visions of dystopia in china’s new historical novels

The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction feature graphic depictions of sex and violence and dark, raunchy comedy, and these novels deeply reflect China’s turbulent recent history

Beyond the civil war hospital

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten ...

The fate of ideas

As editor of the magazine Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century’s most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boye...

Fixing landscape

Fixing Landscape reconsiders China’s Three Gorges Dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Gorges region over more than two millennia, thereby offering radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China.

Beckett, lacan, and the voice

The voice traverses Beckett's work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or em...

Jhumpa lahiri's works in transition

What this book seeks to touch upon is how Lahiri’s fictional as well as nonfictional writings bring out her and her fictional characters’ translational and transnational existence

Ecopoetic place-making

The poets discussed in this book challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries.

V. s. naipaul's journeys

Sanjay Krishnan rereads V. S. Naipaul’s work to offer new perspectives on his achievements, shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul’s life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have restricted discussio...

The lyrical in epic time

In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyrici...

American stories

Nagai Kafu is one of the greatest modern Japanese writers, but until now his classic collection, American Stories, based on his sojourn from Japan to Washington State, Michigan, and New York City in the early years of the twentieth century, has never been available in English. Here, with a detail...

The old man and the wolves

Part detective story, part fable, this novel—narrated by a French journalist—takes the reader to a mythical postindustrial city where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarianism have been erased.

In the company of strangers

In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these ...

A visit from the goon squad reread

Jennifer Egan described her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as a combination of Proust and The Sopranos. In rereading the book, Ivan Kreilkamp takes Egan up on her comparison, showing how it blends a concern with the status of the novel today with an elegiac meditation on...

On company time

On Company Time tells the story of American modernism from inside the offices and on the pages of the most successful and stylish magazines of the twentieth century. Donal Harris draws out the profound institutional, economic, and aesthetic affiliations between modernism and American magazine cul...

On sexuality and power

It is widely supposed that the most suitable partner will be someone very much like oneself; gay fiction and cinema are often organized around this assumption. Nonetheless, power differentials are remarkably persistent—as well as sexy. What are the personal and political implications of this insi...

Anita desai’s india

This book provides an interdisciplinary framework, seamlessly weaving together historical inquiry and literary exploration to offer a holistic understanding of the enduring impacts of Partition.

Subjects of substance

Subjects of Substance traces the ways in which materialist conceptions of selfhood inspire and shape recent U.S. literature. It examines the forms, functions, and effects of materialist models of mind in works by authors including Don DeLillo, Kay Redfield Jamison, Siri Hustvedt, Richard Powers, ...

Travels in manchuria and mongolia

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) was one of Japan's greatest poets and translators from classical Japanese. Her output was extraordinary, including twenty volumes of poetry and the most popular translation of the ancient classic The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. The mother of eleven children, she w...

Jane austen and the romantic poets

This elegant and thoughtful work offers an important new way of understanding Jane Austen by defining the fundamental impact and influence of British Romanticism on her later novels. In comparing the earlier and later phases of Austen's career, Deresiewicz addresses an important yet neglected iss...