“Described by José Garcia Villa as America’s ‘greatest short story writer,’ by Alistair Cooke as the ‘the unrecognized genius of our time,’ and by his biographer as ‘one of the most remarkable, talented, and shamefully neglected writers that America has pro- duced,’ William March (1893–1954) is remembered, if at all, for The Bad Seed, which March ironically regarded as his worst work. The emphasis in The Two Worlds of William March is on the literary career, and we get a fairly full picture of a hardworking, oversensitive, compassionate bachelor, who suffered a tragic breakdown late in life . . . [and] whose best long works, Company K and The Looking-Glass, as well as March himself are almost forgotten. . . . Simmonds’s comprehensive, scholarly, and sympathetic study may redress this unwarranted neglect.” —CHOICE
“Described by José Garcia Villa as America’s ‘greatest short story writer,’ by Alistair Cooke as the ‘the unrecognized genius of our time,’ and by his biographer as ‘one of the most remarkable, talented, and shamefully neglected writers that America has pro- duced,’ William March (1893–1954) is remembered, if at all, for The Bad Seed, which March ironically regarded as his worst work. The emphasis in The Two Worlds of William March is on the literary career, and we get a fairly full picture of a hardworking, oversensitive, compassionate bachelor, who suffered a tragic breakdown late in life . . . [and] whose best long works, Company K and The Looking-Glass, as well as March himself are almost forgotten. . . . Simmonds’s comprehensive, scholarly, and sympathetic study may redress this unwarranted neglect.” —CHOICE
William March: An Annotated Checklist is the definitive resource for readers and scholars of southern writer William March, author of the best-selling Company K, The Bad Seed, and the Pearl County series.
A vigorous reappraisal of American literature inspired by the First World War. American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army’s unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men—except, notoriously, African Americans—to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame. Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper context—as a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressed—often in coded ways—the noncombatant failure to measure up. Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers—Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte—who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn’t the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.
Surviving in Two Worlds brings together the voices of twenty-six Native American leaders. The interviewees come from a variety of tribal backgrounds and include such national figures as Oren Lyons, Arvol Looking Horse, John Echohawk, William Demmert, Clifford Trafzer, Greg Sarris, and Roxanne Swentzell. Their interviews are divided into five sections, grouped around the themes of tradition, history and politics, healing, education, and culture. They take readers into their lives, their dreams and fears, their philosophies and experiences, and show what they are doing to assure the survival of their peoples and cultures, as well as the earth as a whole. Their analyses of the past and present, and especially their counsels for the future, are timely and urgent.
American Isolationism Between the World Wars: The Search for a Nation's Identity examines the theory of isolationism in America between the world wars, arguing that it is an ideal that has dominated the Republic since its founding. During the interwar period, isolationists could be found among Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Protestants, pacifists and militarists, rich and poor. While the dominant historical assessment of isolationism — that it was "provincial" and "short-sighted" — will be examined, this book argues that American isolationism between 1919 and the mid-1930s was a rational foreign policy simply because the European reversion back to politics as usual insured that the continent would remain unstable. Drawing on a wide range of newspaper and journal articles, biographies, congressional hearings, personal papers, and numerous secondary sources, Kenneth D. Rose suggests the time has come for a paradigm shift in how American isolationism is viewed. The text also offers a reflection on isolationism since the end of World War II, particularly the nature of isolationism during the Trump era. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. Foreign Relations and twentieth-century American history.
"Places of risk" and "sites of modernity" refer not merely to physical locations, but also objects and institutions that stand at the center of contemporary debates on security and risk. These are social and political domains where energy and infrastructure are produced, where domestic security is pursued and maintained, and where citizens encounter the state in its punitive or monitory roles. Taking a wide view of the period from the 1970s to today, this volume brings together innovative, interdisciplinary case studies of sites of modernity that promise to provide security and safety, yet at the same time are deemed responsible for creating new risks. With a particular contemporary interest in the technocratic changes of security and risk control the contributors to Sites of Modernity -- Places of Risk position the 1970s as a turning point in the path from industrial to post-industrial modernity.
Born on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, Ping Fu was separated from her family at the age of eight. She grew up fighting hunger and humiliation and shielding her younger sister from the teenagers in Mao’s Red Guard. At twenty-five, she found her way to the United States; her only resources were $80 and a few phrases of English. Yet Ping persevered, and the hard-won lessons of her childhood guided her to success in her new homeland. Aided by her well-honed survival instincts, a few good friends, and the kindness of strangers, she grew into someone she never thought she’d be—a strong, independent, entrepreneurial leader. “She tells her story with intelligence, verve and a candor that is often heart-rending.” —The Wall Street Journal “This well-written tale of courage, compassion, and undaunted curiosity reveals the life of a genuine hero.” —Booklist (starred review) “Her success at the American Dream is a real triumph.” —The New York Post
The monstrous child is the allegorical queer child in various formations of horror cinema: the child with a secret, the child 'possessed' by Otherness, the changeling child, the terrible gang. This book explores the possibilities of 'not growing up' as a model for a queer praxis that confronts the notion of heternormative maturity.
The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.
