Book Review: The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age by Alison Phipps
Two anecdotes in the opening pages of Alison Phipps’s The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age set the scene for what is a thorough, if at times frustrating, investigation into the ‘difficulties of positioning for contemporary feminist theory and activism’ (2).
Continue ReadingBook Review: States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America by Ann Basu
Given that Philip Roth has spent most of his career defending his writing, it’s appropriate that his ‘retirement’ would only be a spur to further debate amongst his readers. After a quiet announcement in the French cultural magazine Les InRocks (so quiet that the Anglophone world didn’t pick up on it until a full month later), Roth called time on a long and storied career. Since then, several critics have already published research that attempts to grapple with the complex issue of Roth’s literary legacy. One of the best of these works is Ann Basu’s recent monograph States of Trial.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Stuff Theory, Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism by Maurizia Boscagli
In Stuff Theory, Maurizia Boscagli approaches the object at a particular moment in the life-cycle of consumer capitalism. When things are no longer desirable – when the shine has worn off, or clothes become overworn, and knick-knacks are shoved to the back of the shelf – but are not yet broken-down enough to be comfortably categorised as trash, they become, for Boscagli, ‘stuff’.
Continue ReadingBook Review: New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction by David Rio
Ranging from Basque immigrants to nuclear waste, the book engages with established depictions of the area through referencing non-Nevadans Hunter S Thompson and Joan Didion as well as less known Nevadan writers such as Frank Bergon and Robert Laxalt. Whilst positing new and dynamic readings, Rio remains sensitive to his reader’s expectations, throwing Las Vegas and Reno’s seedy underbelly in for good measure, producing the first book length study of its kind.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Stefano Ercolino
In this assertive monograph Ercolino seeks to introduce and codify the formal characteristics of what he terms the ‘maximalist novel’: ‘an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel’ that emerged in the United States with William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) (xi).
Continue ReadingBook Review: Melville: Fashioning in Modernity by Stephen Matterson
Before we launch into discussing the academic and literary merits of Matterson’s work per se, it has to be said that even the cover of this particular book evokes a sense of either a deliciously tongue-in-cheek literary inside joke, or else an amusing attempt to make the book more appealing to a lay reader unfamiliar with Melville’s world.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists edited by Michael Lackey
Lackey, a professor of 20th– and 21st–century American literature and culture at University of Minnesota-Morris, tracks the ascent of the biographical novel genre by studying the discussions of landmark texts that took place within the committee awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Foreign Policy: Alliance Politics in a Century of War, 1914-2014, by James W. Peterson
Focusing his attention on the allied countries that fought on the side of the USA over the multiple wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and questioning whether without this considerable political and military support America could be considered as strong an opponent as it was, James W. Peterson discusses the reasons for American involvement in those conflicts.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature by Aimee Pozorski
Surely one of the most memorable and enduring artistic responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker cover, “9/11/2001.” The image initially appears as an utterly dark void, but a closer look reveals the ghostly afterimage of the Twin Towers, rendered in an even deeper shade of black. Published in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Mouly and Spiegelman’s artwork evokes the monochrome despair of a grieving nation, and seemed to usher in a dark night of the American soul.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Grover Cleveland’s New Foreign Policy: Arbitration, Neutrality, and the Dawn of American Empire by Nick Cleaver
Rather than viewing his presidency with the war in mind as the end point of all post-Civil War foreign policy, Nick Cleaver presents an intriguing re-examination of the president and his two chief policy makers, Walter Gresham and Richard Olney, which argues that his foreign policy was formulated with a distinct vision of how the United States should conduct itself in the world that was different from both his predecessors and successors.
Continue Reading