Book Review: The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction by Adam S. Miller
Even for those only casually acquainted with the field of Wallace Studies, the sanctimonious title of this slender volume from Adam S. Miller (Collin College, Texas) – part of Bloomsbury’s ‘New Directions in Religion and Literature’ series – might prompt alarm bells. Indeed, whilst the claim on the back cover – that this is ‘the first book to explore key religious themes’ in the work of Wallace – may be technically true, this is not a subject area that will be unfamiliar to Wallace scholars.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 by Christopher N. Warren
It is a most intriguing business for an American Studies scholar to review a book that hardly mentions America at all.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism – From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond by E.J. Dionne Jr.
American conservatism is a powerful force in US politics. But has the path it has followed been the right one?
Continue ReadingBook review: Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft Industry of American Theater by Timothy R. White
In the introduction to Blue-Collar Broadway, urban historian Timothy R. White contends that his study ‘pushes against the design-oriented boundaries of theatre history’ (8) by focusing on the craftspeople, supply shops, and theatre-related businesses that helped to make Broadway shows during the twentieth century.
Continue ReadingBook Review: This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles E. Cobb
In an interview with Dr Kenneth Clark in 1963 Malcolm X said that Martin Luther King Jr was ‘subsidised by the white man’ into making the Afro-American population of the United States ‘defenceless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts in American history. That’s this American white man.’ Malcolm’s assessment of the weakness of the civil rights movement was shared by other critics including WEB DuBois, however Charles E Cobb Jr’s work attempts to illustrate that such accusations were without foundation and incorrect.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace by Clare Hayes-Brady
It has become difficult to think about David Foster Wallace without thinking about the intense dedication he inspires among his readers. His writing’s knotty brilliance is responsible both for his fanbase and for the field of Wallace Studies. More than perhaps any other late-twentieth-century writer, his work invites an academic response, not least because Wallace himself was fluent in the language and methodologies of academia.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism by Ian McGuire
With the publication of the widely praised Canada in 2012 and the unexpected return to the character of Frank Bascombe in 2014’s Let Me Be Frank With You, Ford himself has been highly active of late, doing regular public readings, interviews and appearances. However, scholarly analysis of Ford’s work has remained scarce, with just a handful of book-length critiques published, and the odd reference to his novels and short stories in studies on more general topics.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Cooperation and Hegemony in US-Latin American Relations: Revisiting the Western Hemisphere Idea edited by Juan Pablo Scarfi and Andrew R. Tillman
The Western Hemisphere idea has never taken a hold upon scholars of United States-Latin American relations as much as it perhaps ought to have. Formulated by Thomas Jefferson in 1813 and given notable scholarly treatment by historian Arthur Whitaker in the 1950s, the Western Hemisphere idea posits that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere ‘stand in a special relationship to one another’, which in turn ‘sets them apart from the rest of the world.’
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Apocalypse: A History of American Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton
The aim of Matthew Avery Sutton’s ambitious new monograph, American Apocalypse, is to trace the development of modern evangelicalism in the United States from its late nineteenth century origins to the present day. Central to this story is the question of how the powerful conservative wing of the movement eventually became, during the height of its influence at the end of the twentieth century, a mainstream, unified force which was able to effect the outcome of elections.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television: The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture by Michael Mario Albrecht
Albrecht first assesses FX sitcom The League as a ‘bromance,’ and a show that ‘offers a hyperbolic version of contemporary masculinity,’ that suggests the concept is ‘an overdetermined term with multiple iterations and complexities, rather than… a simplistic essentialist version of singular maleness’ (42). He provocatively uses the language of ‘safe space’ to suggest how the virtual space of a fantasy football league is utilised to act out unacceptable performances of masculinity, safe from misinterpretation and consequences (46).
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