Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature
Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature

Author: Kristin J. Jacobson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-04

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 3319738518

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This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

Beyond Liminality
Beyond Liminality

Author: Jack David Eller

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-08

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1040038840

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Beyond Liminality: Ontologies of Abundant Betweenness examines the concept of liminality in the social sciences and humanities, and advocates for a more critical use of the concept while offering more precise alternatives. Originally conceived in response to the near-universal ritualization of changes of status (i.e., "rites of passage"), liminality was a welcome and much-needed correction to the reigning static and structural models of culture at the time. However, it soon escaped its initial realm and was enthusiastically—and mostly uncritically—absorbed by many if not all scholarly disciplines. The very success of the concept suggests that there is something about it that resonates with our own cultural sentiments. However, the assumptions that underlie diagnoses of liminality are seldom noted and even more seldom analyzed and critiqued. This book examines the history of the concept, its evolution, and its current status, and asks whether liminality accurately reflects lived realities which might better be described by fluidity, hybridity, multiplicity, constant motion and recombination, and abundant betweenness. Beyond Liminality: Ontologies of Abundant Betweenness is key reading for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities interested in ritual, performance, identity formation, rights, ontology, and epistemology.

Gender in American Literature and Culture
Gender in American Literature and Culture

Author: Jean M. Lutes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 1108805507

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Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.

Single Lives
Single Lives

Author: Katherine Fama

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2022-05-13

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1978828519

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Inspired by the current public fascination with single women, Single Lives traces the relationship between modern and contemporary representations of single women. The original essays collected here analyze a broad range of texts that examine the ways films, cookbooks, archives, popular literature, and other British and American texts express norms, ideals, and challenges for single women and their relationship to dominant ideals of marriage and the family. This volume looks backwards to constellate existing scholarship, constituent fields, and unrecognized single voices and forward to consider new methods for interdisciplinary singles studies.

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes
The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes

Author: Patrick O'Donnell

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 1607

ISBN-13: 1119431719

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Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

Approaches to Teaching Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Approaches to Teaching Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Author: Lynn Domina

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2024-07-13

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1603296565

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One of the most commonly taught slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is rightly celebrated for its progressive and distinctive appeals to dismantle the dehumanizing system of American slavery. Depicting the abuse Jacobs experienced, her years in hiding, and her escape to the North, the work evokes sympathy for Jacobs as a woman and a mother. Today, it continues to inform readers about gender and sexuality, power and justice, and Black identity in the United States. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses different editions of the work and suggests background readings. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," explore Jacobs's literary techniques and influences, drawing on autobiography theory, medical humanities, and theology, among other perspectives. Contributors also propose pairings with historical and recent literary works as well as teaching approaches involving visual arts, geography, archives, digital humanities, and service learning.

A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam
A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam

Author: Sabine Planka

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-11-11

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1666912263

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A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam provides a fresh, up-to-date exploration of the director’s films and artistic practices, ranging from his first film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) to his recently released and latest film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). This volume presents Gilliam as a director whose films weave together an avant-garde cinematic style, imaginative exaggeration, and social critique. Consequently, while his films can seem artistically chaotic and thus have the effect of frustrating and upsetting the viewer, the essays in this volume show that this is part of a very disciplined creative plan to achieve the defamiliarization of various accepted notions of human and social life.

Disaffected
Disaffected

Author: Xine Yao

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-09-08

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1478022108

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In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality
Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality

Author: Sarah Faber

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-11

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1003852963

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From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties. This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films, podcasts, and games – in case studies which outline the central relationship between the Gothic and transgression, particularly gender(ed) and sexual transgression. This relationship is both crucial and constantly shifting, ever in the process of renegotiation, as transgression defines the Gothic and society redefines transgression. The case studies draw on a combination of well-studied and under-studied texts in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of transgression in the Gothic. Pointing the way forward in Gothic Studies, this original and nuanced combination of gendered, Ecogothic, queer, and media critical approaches addresses established and new scholars of the Gothic alike.

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Readings on Tribe and Religions in India
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Readings on Tribe and Religions in India

Author: Maguni Charan Behera

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-08

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 1040125662

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Tribal societies in India observe a diverse set of religious practices which are a quintessential part of their community life. This handbook explores rituals, beliefs, ceremonies and festivals, liturgy, knowledge and traditions that tribal people practice today and traces the history of their interaction with other religions, communities and cultures. The book provides analytical, intellectual, and cultural insights into the religious tradition of tribes within the interactive space of a pan-Indian civilisation. It examines contemporary religious practice within tribes while also exploring changes either brought on by interactions or political interventions. The volume reflects on the intersections of cultural or political life of communities and their religious worldviews. The book also discusses the processes of assimilation or adoption of different religion or religious traditions by tribes and the challenges of detribalisation and shrinking populations of vulnerable groups. It explores both established and emerging dynamics in the field of tribe and religion and provides a look into the unique systems of kinship, worship and life within many different tribal communities in India. This and its companion handbook, The Routledge Handbook of Tribe and Religions in India: Contemporary Readings on Spirituality, Belief and Identity, provide a comprehensive look into the religious life and practices of a very diverse group of tribes in India. It will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the fields of religion, anthropology, indigenous and tribal studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology of culture, sociology of religion, development studies, history, political science, folkloristic, and colonialism.