Book 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 ReadingReview: ‘The Historical “Dispute of the New World”: European Historians of the United States and European History, Culture and Public Life’
The vast majority of speakers emphasized the importance of geographic location in writing U.S. history, albeit with different nuances. For example, diverse focuses included migration among Swedish Americanists, the state in France, and transatlantic relations in Italy, clearly showed the relevance of location in defining the different national contexts of U.S. historiography.
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: Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen
In the centrefold photograph from a pig farmer’s magazine, entitled “Ursula Hamdress,” a seemingly unconscious, pale-skinned pig in panties reclines on a sofa, with red-painted trotters parted. This shocking image, a conflated objectification of both woman and animal, stands as a central example of the concerns of Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth.
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 ReadingBook Review: State of Recovery: The Quest to Restore American Security after 9/11 by Barry Scott Zellen
The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001 was a watershed moment in national security in the United States. For the first time since Pearl Harbour, US homeland defences had been penetrated by enemy combatants and casualties had been suffered.
Continue ReadingReview: The State of Fiction: Don DeLillo in the 21st Century
DeLillo’s late twentieth century novels are striking in their engagement with distinctly twenty-first century concerns; from the pervasive influence of commercial media, to the insidious spectre of terrorism on contemporary society.
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