Synopses & Reviews
In When Sex Changed, Layne Parish Craig analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain.
Discussion of contraception and related topics (including feminism, religion, and eugenics) changed the way that writers depicted women, marriage, and family life. Tracing this shift, Craig compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, reflected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, to concern about the movement’s race and class implications suggested in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications, as in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.
While these texts emphasized birth control’s potential to transform marriage and family life and emancipate women from the “slavery” of constant childbearing, birth control advocates also used less-than-liberatory language that excluded the poor, the mentally ill, non-whites, and others. Ultimately, Craig argues, the debates that began in these early political and literary texts—texts that document both the birth control movement’s idealism and its exclusionary rhetoric—helped shape the complex legacy of family planning and women’s rights with which the United States and the United Kingdom still struggle.
Review
andldquo;Elegantly written, Main Street and Empire is of the utmost importance to the reconceptualization of American exceptionalism within a transnational geography. This book is certain to exert a major influence on accounts of global American modernity for many years to come.andrdquo;
Review
andquot;The most incisive analysis available about representational discourses of small towns U.S.A. From classic texts to corporate advertising, Poll reveals a small town imaginary shaping an age of globalization.andquot;
Review
andquot;Using broad cultural analysis, Poll investigates the centrality of the small town, as represented in literature, to the cultural imagination of the US. An impressive, multifaceted exploration of the small town as a symbol. Readers with some background in literary theory will find this book most compelling. Recommended.andquot;
Review
“This well-conceived, well-executed, and theoretically informed study is wonderfully original—it will appeal not only to literature scholars but also, I should think, to all interested in economics, sociology, literary theory, and film."
Review
"In the wake of the financial collapse and the Occupy movement, Fictions Inc. anatomizes the corporation’s hostile takeover of American culture and argues for fiction's and film’s ability to resist the current order—and demonstrates criticism’s ability to do the same."
Review
“With a transatlantic approach that yields fascinating results, Layne Craig’s
When Sex Changed adds nuance, new insight, and fresh ideas to previous historical and literary studies of the birth control movement.”
Review
"In
When Sex Changed, Craig breaks new ground by establishing the transnational nature of the 'political ascendance and gradual institutionalization of birth control as a family planning model' with a well-researched history of birth control politics. She succeeds in bringing to light new meanings buried in texts well combed-over by literary scholars."
Review
“Compellingly juxtaposing proletarian and neo-slave novels, Jennifer Williamson's book breaks important new ground in redefining and reevaluating the sentimental tradition within literary and American studies of the twentieth century.”
Review
"Jennifer Williamson writes with unusual range. Drawing concepts from the nineteenth century, she gives excellent readings of twentieth century texts, inclusive of gender, race, and traditions. Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism is an important book."
Review
"A helpful addition to the literature of sentimentalism. Recommended."
Review
andquot;With ingenuity, nuance, and an eye for visual detail, Coon's timely and significant bookand#160;explores theand#160;tendency ofand#160;recent mediaand#160;narratives to questionand#160;the sanitized, simplisticand#160;myth of suburbia.andquot;
Review
andquot;Coon's savvy book is dynamic, contentious, and revealing. His persuasive analyses show how cinema, television, and advertising have both reinforced and challenged prevailing ideas of the 'burb and the happy, bizarre, and painful lifestyles that unfold there.andquot;
Review
andquot;Coon primarily examines contemporary Hollywood representations of middle-class life in the US cul-de-sacs. This is a well-written book that will benefit a variety of readers. Highly recommended.andquot;
Review
"An incisive study of a hotly-debated term in U.S. poetry today,
American Hybrid Poetics reveals how women’s hybrid forms converse with, and subvert, the gendered tropes of mass media culture. Robbins reveals that women’s hybrid poetics possesses not only a history but—more important—a politics, whose radicalism should no longer be ignored."
Review
“With layers of richness and historicized depth, American Hybrid Poetics makes a distinct contribution to the field. Robbins’s lively writing and strong critical voice are splendid.”
Review
"Fictions Inc is highly topical and fills the existing void in literary criticism, namely in the depiction of the corporation ... this well-informed study shows that literature and culture are not only engaged in racial and sexual politics, but also in the examination and critique of late capitalism."
Synopsis
In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll argues that the small town, as evoked by the image of andldquo;Main Street,andrdquo; is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which the nationandrsquo;s andldquo;everydayandrdquo; stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global level. It brings together a wide range of literary, cultural, and political texts to examine how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century.
Synopsis
The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small townandrsquo;s centrality to the United Statesandrsquo; identity and imagination.
In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll addresses this need, arguing that the small town, as evoked by the image of andldquo;Main Street,andrdquo; is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which Americaandrsquo;s andldquo;everydayandrdquo; stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global scale.
Bringing together a broad selection of textsandmdash;from Thornton Wilderandrsquo;s Our Town, Grace Metaliousandrsquo;s Peyton Place, and Peter Weirandrsquo;s The Truman Show to the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obamaandmdash;Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism.
and#160;
Synopsis
Fictions Inc. explores how depictions of the corporation in American literature, film, and popular culture have changed over time. Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of biopolitics, and the legal status of “corporate bodies,” Fictions Inc. shows that representations of corporations have come to serve, whether directly or indirectly, as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend.
Synopsis
Fictions Inc. explores how depictions of the corporation in American literature, film, and popular culture have changed over time. Beginning with perhaps the most famous depiction of a corporation—Frank Norris’s
The Octopus—Ralph Clare traces this figure as it shifts from monster to man, from force to “individual,” and from American industry to multinational “Other.” Clare examines a variety of texts that span the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, including novels by Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Joshua Ferris; films such as
Network,
Ghostbusters,
Gung Ho,
Office Space, and
Michael Clayton; and assorted artifacts of contemporary media such as television’s
The Office and the comic strips
Life Is Hell and
Dilbert.
Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of biopolitics, and the legal status of “corporate bodies,” Fictions Inc. shows that representations of corporations have come to serve, whether directly or indirectly, as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend. Whether demonized or lionized, the corporation embodies American anxieties about these current conditions and ongoing fears about the viability of a capitalist system.
Synopsis
American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics—a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets—Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt and contest the language of the dominant culture as it is reproduced in genres of mainstream mass culture.
Synopsis
American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics—a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets—Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions—consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness—these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.
Synopsis
This book argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.
About the Author
AMY MOORMAN ROBBINS is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY, where she specializes in modern and contemporary experimental poetics with emphasis on the work of women poets. She has published critical essays on the work of Gertrude Stein (
Journal of Lesbian Studies), Harryette Mullen (
Contemporary Literature), and Alice Notley (
Pacific Coast Philology).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From Manchuria to Manchuria Inc.
1 California Dreaming: Twentieth-Century Corporate Fictions at the End of the Frontier
2 “Domo Arigato, Mr. Sakamoto, for the New Non-Union Contract!”: (Multi)National Threats and the Decline of the American Auto Industry in Ron Howard’s Gung Ho
3 Good Times, Bad Times . . . You Know I Had My Share(s): The Corporation in Five Popular Films
4 A Capital Death: Medicine, Technology, and the Care of the Self in Don DeLillo’s White Noise
5 Family Incorporated: William Gaddis’s J R and the Embodiment of Capitalism
6 Your Loss Is Their Gain: The Corporate Body and the Corporeal Body in Richard Powers’s Gain
Conclusion: Corporate Hegemony, Cubed
Notes
Works Cited
Index