Literary Criticism

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Through a Nuclear Lens

Examines the increasingly reciprocal nature of Franco-Japanese cultural exchange through films that center on nuclear issues.

Soundings in Context

Renowned poets and scholars address the question of how poetry sounds and signifies in different contexts.

The Serpent's Plumes

Draws on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.

The Recursive Frontier

Shows how the myth of the American frontier persists as an ever-present, oppressive set of ideas about space, mobility, and race in the mid-twentieth-century literature of Los Angeles.

Spanish American Literature in the Age of Machines and Other Essays

Brings together and makes available in English for the first time some of Ángel Rama’s most important essays.

Tracking Capital

Offers new ways to read the relationship between culture, ecology, and capitalism.

Apparitions, Daemons, and Emanations

A study of non-representational art and poetry in the work of Bataille, Klossowski, and Michaux.

Masculine Pregnancies

Examines literary depictions of “mannish” pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to reframe the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism.

Psychoanalysis

By Jeffrey Berman
Subjects: Psychology

Assesses the contributions of six major psychoanalytic thinkers in the light of current academic and clinical trends in psychoanalysis.

Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel

A probing, generative analysis of Knausgård’s My Struggle, with implications for our understanding of the novel form more broadly in the twenty-first century.

The Promise of Friendship

Argues that friendship is the gift of a world that is not one's own and that transforms one's world in unforseeable ways.

Struck by Apollo

Retraces Hölderlin's journeys to Bordeaux and back in 1801–02, explaining why they are turning points in the great poet's life.

Romantic Immanence

Offers a new, Spinozist framework for understanding encounters with otherness in Romantic literature as experiences of immanence.

Thresholds, Encounters

Explores the various ways in which poetic and philosophical writing meet in texts by, and on, Paul Celan.

Spanish American Literature in the Age of Machines and Other Essays

Brings together and makes available in English for the first time some of Ángel Rama’s most important essays.

Feminism's Progress

Explores how popular novels, short stories, and television shows from the United States and Britain illustrate the positive effects of feminism and promote gender equity.

Poetics of the Local

Considers how Irish poets have drawn on discourses of locality to articulate new forms of place and belonging amid Ireland’s transforming global identity.

The Other Synaesthesia

Reconsiders the figure of synaesthesia, understood as the combination of the senses and of the arts, in philosophy and literature.

Doubly Erased

A wide-ranging overview of contemporary literary works by LGBTQ Appalachians with a focus on LGBTQ themes and characters.

Dialogue on the Threshold

A reconstruction and critical interpretation of Heidegger's remarkable relationship to the poet Georg Trakl.

A Latin American Existentialist Ethos

Examines twentieth-century Mexican literature and philosophy within the broad panorama of Latin American and European existentialisms.

Equal Natures

Explores how Victorian women writers used the popular science of phrenology to challenge socially constructed forms of power.

Black in Print

Explores the role of print media in conversations about race and belonging across Central America.

A Bastard Kind of Reasoning

Ranges widely and deeply across William Blake's oeuvre to show how his post-Newtonian vision of space-time anticipates Einsteinian relativity.

The Chinese Love Story from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century

Traces the development of the Chinese love story during the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Amos Oz

Explores the writer's enduring literary and political legacy.

This Side of Philosophy

Assesses a distinct style of thinking in twentieth-century Spanish writing, one in which literature plays a central role in reaching behind philosophy to essential sources of life and meaning.

Relocating the Sacred

Maps manifestations of the sacred and religious syncretism in Afro-Brazilian cultural forms.

Personation Plots

Examines the fascination with identity fraud in sensation fiction and Victorian culture more broadly.

Accumulation and Subjectivity

Reconsiders key concepts in Marxist thought by examining the relationship between accumulation and subjectivity in Latin American narrative, film, and social and political theory.

The Tyranny of Common Sense

Elucidates how neoliberalism rules all areas of life and operates as a form of common sense, taking Mexico as a case study.

Between Camp and Cursi

Examines how contemporary Mexican literature uses humor to contest heteronormativity.

Lives beyond Borders

Examines how contemporary US migrant women's life writing adapts autobiographical genres to call for social change benefiting minoritized communities.

Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America

Illuminates the ways games—from baseball cards to board games, charades to boxing, and croquet to strategies of war—were integral to nineteenth-century life and culture in the United States and Britain.

Literature and Skepticism

Examines the skeptical foundations of literature in order to reassess the status of fiction.

Smooth Operating and Other Social Acts

An engaging homage to African American resilience and resourcefulness in US literature and culture.

Through the Periscope

Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.

A Black Forest Walden

Compares life today in the German Black Forest with Thoreau's experiences at Walden Pond.

Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America

Examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have drawn on and debated the validity of Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.

Tales from Du Bois

Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.

Engaging Italy

By Etta M. Madden
Subjects: Literature

Traces literary and social connections among three American women navigating the changing political landscape of 1860s and '70s Italy.

Barcelona, City of Comics

Explores the close relationship between comics and urbanism in one of Europe's most notable global cities.

Material Insurgency

Examines emerging new materialist and posthuman conceptions of subjectivity and agency, and explores their increasing significance for contemporary climate change environmentalism.

Sensitive Negotiations

Examines how Indigenous figures used British Romantic poetry in their interactions with settler governments and publics.

Portraits

Explores Elie Wiesel’s portraits of the sages of Judaism and elaborates on the Hasidic legacy from his life and his teaching.

Premises and Problems

Edited by Luiza Franco Moreira
Introduction by Luiza Franco Moreira
Subjects: Literature
Series: SUNY Press Open Access

Discusses world literature and cinema from the perspective of literary languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position.

Poetics of Breathing

A comparative study of breath and breathing as a core poetic and compositional principle in modern literature.

Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy

Edited by Mark Alznauer
Subjects: Philosophy

Explores the full extent of Hegel’s interest in tragedy and comedy throughout his works and extends from more literary and dramatic issues to questions about the role these genres play in the history of society and religion.

Flesh of My Flesh

Examines representations of sexual violence in modern Hebrew literature, focusing on the ways in which sexual aggression relates to Zionism, gender, ethnicity, and disability.

Avant-Gardes in Crisis

Charts underexamined genealogies of minoritarian aesthetic responses to the multiple crises of the long 1970s.

Creative Transformations

Explores the role of travel and translation in Brazilian literature and culture from the 1870s to the present.

Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene

Forges a fresh interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s oeuvre as a response to ecological instability.

Taxation in Utopia

An interdisciplinary exploration of utopian political philosophy from the neglected perspective of taxation.

Since 1948

A portrait of Israeli literature in its full transnational and multilingual complexity.

Racialized Visions

The first volume in English to explore the cultural impact of Haiti on the surrounding Spanish-speaking nations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.

The Blossom Which We Are

Charts the vicissitudes of a distinctly modern and peculiarly human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile, time-bound cultural framework that we inhabit—in the history of the realist novel.

Super Schoolmaster

Traces the controversial poet’s thinking about teaching and learning throughout his career.

Medicine Is War

Examines how literature mediated a convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture that continues into the present via a widespread martial metaphor.

Joan Didion

Explores how Didion's nonfiction prose style, often lauded for being beautiful and poetic, also works rhetorically.

The Play of Light

Juxtaposes five contemporary French poets, illuminating the philosophical elements of their work while making their sometimes difficult writing newly accessible.

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction

Argues that the role of Buddhism in modern Japanese prose literature has been significantly overlooked.

Beyond Gold and Diamonds

The first book to examine and establish characteristics of the British South African novel.

Intersecting Diasporas

Examines literary expressions of allyship between Italian America and other diasporic communities in modern and contemporary US fiction.

Michael Gold

An authoritative biography of the dean of American proletarian writers during the interwar years.

Against the Despotism of Fact

First comprehensive account of the figure of the Irish Celt in modern British and Irish literature.

Changed Forever, Volume II

The second volume of the first in-depth study of a range of literature written by Native Americans who attended government-run boarding schools.

Teardrops of Time

Investigates how the Thai poet Angkarn Kallayanapong adapts Buddhist concepts of time to create a modern Asian aesthetic imaginary.

Death Rights

Analyzes how literary representations of suicide have reinforced antiblackness in the modern world.

The World of Agha Shahid Ali

Critical essays on the transnational Kashmiri-American poet.

A Permanent Beginning

Situates a Hasidic master in the context of his time, demonstrating his formative influence on Jewish literary modernity.

Image and Argument in Plato's Republic

Argues that images are at the heart of the dialogue’s philosophical argumentation.

Victorian Structures

Argues that the descriptions of buildings frequently encountered in Victorian novels offer more than evocative settings for characters and plot; instead, such descriptions signal these novels' self-reflexive consideration of the structure itself.

Black Cultural Mythology

Offers a new conceptual framework rooted in mythological analysis to ground the field of Africana cultural memory studies.

Kept from All Contagion

Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.

The Space of Disappearance

Examines the evolution of disappearance as a formal narrative and epistemological phenomenon in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction.

Capital in the Mirror

Analyzes contemporary capitalism through the products of culture and art for fresh insight into emancipatory possibilities concealed within capitalism’s darkest dynamics.

Announcements

A study of novelty through analyses of the language of announcement in revolutionary texts.

Postcolonial Lack

Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference.

Modernity as Exception and Miracle

Proposes "the extraordinary" as a defining characteristic of modernity.

DIY on the Lower East Side

Engaging look at Lower East Side writers and artists in the wake of the 1975 New York fiscal crisis.

The Aesthetics of Senescence

Investigates how nineteenth-century British literature grappled with a new understanding of aging as both an individual and collective experience.

Off the Derech

Combines powerful first-person accounts with incisive scholarly analysis to understand the phenomenon of ultra-Orthodox Jews who leave their insular communities and venture into the wider world.

Authorized Agents

Examines the relation between Indian diplomacy and nineteenth-century Native American literature.

Forms of Disappointment

Analyzes parallel developments in post–Cold War literature and film from Cuba and Angola to trace a shared history of revolutionary enthusiasm, disappointment, and solidarity.

Cub Reporters

By Paige Gray
Subjects: Literature

Investigates how depictions of young people in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America use artifice to destabilize pre-existing narratives of truth, news, and fact.

Victorian Negatives

Argues that the photographic negative gives a new way of understanding Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies as well as reality and representation.

Argentine Intimacies

Revisits a foundational moment in Argentine history to demonstrate how the crisis of modernity opened up new possibilities for imagining kinship otherwise.

Romantic Vacancy

Examines the concept of a poetics of vacancy in Romantic-era literature.

Reconciling Nature

Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War.

The Autobiography of a Language

Explores the links between language, cultural identity, and creativity through the works of Emanuel Carnevali, one of the first Italian American authors to attain literary recognition.

An Ethic of Innocence

Offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature.

The Struggle for Understanding

An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels.

Possessed Voices

Analyzes audio recordings of interwar Hebrew plays, providing a new model for the use of sound in theater studies.

Emerson in Iran

By Roger Sedarat
Subjects: Literature

Examines the impact of Persian poetry in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Argentina Noir

An engaging and insightful guide to Argentine crime fiction since 2000.

Legacies of the Sublime

Pairs literary works with philosophical and theoretical texts to examine how the Kantian sublime influenced authors in their treatments of freedom and subjectivity through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage

Explores the wide-ranging impact of the Mexican Revolution on global cinema and Western intellectual thought.

Queer Expectations

Examines how Jewish women have used poetry to challenge their historical limitations while rewriting their potential futures.

New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures

Surveys the current state of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures as well as approaches to teaching them.

Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France

Edited by Heidi Brevik-Zender
Subjects: Literature

An interdisciplinary examination of French fashion, modernity, and materiality from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.