Ghost Writing In Contemporary American Fiction

This book examines representations of the specter in American twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. David Coughlan’s innovative structure has chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, particularly within the context of his 1993 text, Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter—that is, without ghost writing.

This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts – and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures – metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture. Marjorie Garber, one of the most eminent Shakespearean theorists writing today, asks what is at stake in the imputation that "Shakespeare" did not write the plays, and shows that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy. This Routledge Classics edition contains a new preface and new chapter by the author.

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Food Studies and American literary scholarship, Piatti-Farnell investigates the significances of food and eating in American fiction, from 1980 to the present day. She argues that culturally-coded representations of the culinary illuminate contemporary American anxieties about class gender, race, tradition, immigration, nationhood, and history. As she offers a critical analysis of major works of contemporary fiction, Piatti-Farnell unveils contrasting modes of culinary nostalgia, disillusionment, and progress that pervasively address the cultural disintegration of local and familiar culinary values, in favor of globalized economies of consumption. In identifying different incarnations of the "American culinary," Piatti-Farnell covers the depiction of food in specific categories of American fiction and explores how the cultural separation that molds food preferences inevitably challenges the existence of a homogenous American identity. The study treads on new grounds since it not only provides the first comprehensive study of food and consumption in contemporary American fiction, but also aims to expose interrelated politics of consumption in a variety of authors from different ethnic, cultural, racial and social backgrounds within the United States.

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 current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

The American Novel Now navigates the vast terrain of the American novel since 1980, exploring issues of identity, history, family, nation, and aesthetics, as well as cultural movements and narrative strategies from over seventy different authors and novels. Discusses an exceptionally wide-range of authors and novels, from established figures to significant emerging writers Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Louise Erdrich, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Kathy Acker and many more Explores the range of themes and styles offered in the wealth of contemporary American fiction since 1980, in both mainstream and experimental writings Reflects the liveliness and diversity of American fiction in the last thirty years Written in a style that makes it ideal for students and scholars, while also accessible for general readers

Contemporary American Fiction provides an introduction to American fiction since 1970. Offering substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty texts by thirty different writers, Millard combines them in an innovative critical structure designed to promote debates on cultural politics and aesthetic value. The book is the first of its kind to offer a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in the fiction of the United States. Recent novels by established writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth are analysed alongside the fiction of younger writers such as Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie. The books innovative structure encourages new ways of thinking about how American writers might be configured in relation to each other, while providing an analysis of how contemporary fiction has responded to changes in central areas of American life such as the family, the media, technology, and consumerism. Contemporary American Fiction is a substantial critical introduction to some of the most exciting fiction of the last thirty years, an eclectic and thorough advertisement for the extraordinary vitality of American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. This is an excellent introduction to the subject for undergraduate students of modern American literature.

This collection features studies on trauma, literary theory, and psychoanalysis in women’s writing. It examines the ways in which literature helps to heal the wounded self, and it particularly concentrates attention on the way women explain the traumatic experiences of war, violence, or displacement. Covering a global range of women writers, this book focuses on the psychoanalytic role of literature in helping recover the voices buried by intense pain and suffering and to help those voices be heard. Literature brings the unconscious into being and focus, reconfiguring life through narration. These essays look at the relationship between traumatic experience and literary form.

The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings.

This book expands the scope of understanding of the vast, albeit uneven, experience of the 1947 Partition of India by including localities and life stories from and beyond the regions of Punjab and Bengal. Building on existing research on Partition, the chapters present and analyse the consequences of Partition displacement and the resilience of communities in different parts of the nation. Regions discussed include the Chitmahals, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Andaman Islands, and Jammu and Kashmir. The contributors show that the heterogeneity of people’s experiences reside in spaces of the family, home, neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities refugee settlements, letters, memoirs, biographies, films, fiction, oral histories, and testimonies. The book examines the Partition’s complex effects in regions, localities and contexts and its material and psychological ramifications. This book is a unique and comprehensive contribution in enabling a more complex understanding of how Partition played out and continues to do so for groups and generations across India. It will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience, including history, literature, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, modern Asian studies, studies of South Asia, and studies of memory and trauma.

In Designs of Darkness, Arthur M. Saltzman examines some of the ways in which fiction has traditionally conspired to promote a goal-oriented vision of the work of art—and explores the ways in which postmodern (or postrealist) fiction consistently and unavoidably subverts the clarity of this vision. Offering readings of works by well-known authors, including Barthelme, Doctorow, DeLillo, and Hakes, as well as works by lesser-known writers (Auster, Gangemi), Saltzman concentrates on the breakdown of epiphany in recent fiction, both as philosophical motive and as structural foundation. In contemporary fiction, Saltzman contends, ambiguities blossom far beyond our capacities to stabilize, summarize, or restore them to sense. The old rules of the game—in which a reader looking for truth can expect come sort of satisfactory resolution—no longer apply. Literature now comes out of the answerless. Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction is a valuable new resource for scholars and students of contemporary literature.

Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous: Of Gods and Monsters explores the intersection of the emerging field of “monster theory” within religious studies. With case studies from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary valleys of the Himalayas to ghost tours in Savannah, Georgia, the volume examines the variegated nature of the monstrous as well as the cultural functions of monsters in shaping how we see the world and ourselves. In this, the authors constructively assess the state of the two fields of monster theory and religious studies, and propose new directions in how these fields can inform each other. The case studies included illuminate the ways in which monsters reinforce the categories through which a given culture sees the world. At the same time, the volume points to how monsters appear to question, disrupt, or challenge those categories, creating an ‘unsettling’ or surplus of meaning.

American culture has long represented mixed-race identity in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it has been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies; however, it can also connote genetic superiority, exceptional beauty, and special potentiality. This ambivalence has found its way into superhero media, which runs the gamut from Ant-Man and the Wasp’s tragic mulatta villain Ghost to the cinematic depiction of Aquaman as a heroic “half-breed.” The essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that racial mixedness has been presented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature. They explore how superhero media positions mixed-race characters within a genre that has historically privileged racial purity and propagated images of white supremacy. The book considers such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe. Examining both literal and symbolic representations of racial mixing, this study interrogates how we might challenge and rewrite stereotypical narratives about mixed-race identity, both in superhero media and beyond.

In this comprehensive textbook, editors Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan, and Matthew J. Smith offer students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics. Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. Contributors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including disability studies, parasocial relationships, scientific humanities, queer theory, linguistics, critical geography, philosophical aesthetics, historiography, and much more. As a companion to the acclaimed Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, this second volume features 19 fresh perspectives and serves as a stand-alone textbook in its own right. More Critical Approaches to Comics is a compelling classroom or research text for students and scholars interested in Comics Studies, Critical Theory, the Humanities, and beyond.

Post-millennial writings function as a useful prism through which we can understand contemporary English culture and its compulsion to revisit the immediate past. The critical practice of hauntology turns to the past in order to make sense of the present, to understand how we got to this place and how to build a better future. Since the Year 2000, popular culture has been inundated with representations of those who occupy a space between being and non-being and defy ontological criteria. This Pivot explores a range of contemporary English literatures - from the poetry of Simon Armitage and the drama of Jez Butterworth, to the fiction of Zadie Smith and the stories of David Peace - that collectively unite to represent a twenty-first century world full of specters, reminiscence and representations of spectral encounters. These specters become visible and significant as they interact with a range of social, political and economic discourses that continue to speak to the contemporary period. The enduring fascination with the spectral offers valuable insights into a contemporary English culture in which spectral manifestations signal towards larger social anxieties as well as to specific historical events and recurrent cultural preoccupations. The specter confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation, encouraging the realisation that we must engage with it in order to create meaning. Narrative agency is the primary motivating force of its return, and the repetition of the specter functions to highlight new meanings and perspectives. Harnessing hauntology as a lens through which to consider the specters haunting twenty-first century English writings, this Pivot examines the emergence of a vein of hauntological literature that profiles the pervasive presence of the past in our new millennium.

New Strangers in Paradise offers the first in-depth account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive generations of immigrants to reach U.S. shores. Gilbert Muller reveals how the intersections of peoples, regions, and competing cultural histories have remade the American cultural landscape in the aftermath of World War II. Muller focuses on the literature of Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Caribbeans, and Asian Americans. In the quest for a new identity, each of these groups seeks the American dream and rewrites the story of what it means to be an American. New Strangers in Paradise explores the psychology of uprooted peoples and the relations of culture and power, addressing issues of race and ethnicity, multiculturalism and pluralism, and national and international conflicts. Examining the groups of immigrants in the cultural and historical context both of America and of the lands from which they originated, Muller argues that this "fourth wave" of immigration has led to a creative flowering in modern fiction. The book offers a fresh perspective on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Sual Bellow, William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others.

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 possibility of terror — whether state or non-state, external or homegrown — shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought.