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Douglas Dowland

When Americans describe their compatriots, who exactly are they talking about? This is the urgent question that Douglas Dowland asks in We, Us, and Them. In search of answers, he turns to narratives of American nationhood written since the Vietnam War—stories in which the ostensibly strong state of the Union has been turned increasingly into an America of us versus them. Dowland explores how a range of writers across the political spectrum, including Hunter S. Thompson, James Baldwin, and J. D. Vance, articulate a particular vision of America with such strong conviction that they undermine the unity of the country they claim to extol. We, Us, and Them pinpoints instances in which criticism leads to cynicism, rage leads to apathy, and a broad vision narrows in our present moment.

University of Virginia Press

Cultural Frames, Framing Culture

We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump

Molly Slavin

Why does crime feature at the center of so many postcolonial novels set in major cities? This book interrogates the connections that can be found between narratives of crime, cities, and colonialism to bring to light the ramifications of this literary preoccupation, as well as possibilities for cultural, aesthetic, and political catharsis.

Examining late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels set in London, Belfast, Mumbai, Sydney, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and urban areas in the Palestinian West Bank, Criminal Cities considers the marks left by neocolonialism and imperialism on the structures, institutions, and cartographies of twenty-first-century cities. Molly Slavin suggests that literary depictions of urban crime can offer unique capabilities for literary characters, as well as readers, to process and negotiate that lingering colonial violence, while also providing avenues for justice and forms of reparations.

Criminal Cities: The Postcolonial Novel and Cathartic Crime

Bonnie M. Hagerman

Skimpy Coverage explores Sports Illustrated’s treatment of female athletes since the iconic magazine’s founding in 1954. The first book-length study of its kind, this accessible account charts the ways in which Sports Illustrated—arguably the leading sports publication in postwar America—engaged with the social and cultural changes affecting women’s athletics and the conversations about gender and identity they spawned.

Bonnie Hagerman examines the emergence of the magazine’s archetypal female athlete—good-looking, straight, and white—and argues that such qualities were the same ones the magazine prized in the women who appeared in its wildly successful Swimsuit Issue. As Hagerman shows, the female athlete and the swimsuit model, at least for the magazine, were essentially one and the same. Despite this conflation, and the challenges it poses, Hagerman also tracks the distance that sportswomen—including Wilma Rudolph, Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe—have traveled both within Sports Illustrated’s pages and without. Blending sports with gender history, Skimpy Coverage profiles numerous sportswomen who have used athletics and the platform sport offers to push for empowerment, freedom, equality, and acceptance in ways that have complemented and inspired broader feminist agendas.

Skimpy Coverage: Sports Illustrated and the Shaping of the Female Athlete

Helga Lenart-Cheng

Social media has facilitated the sharing of once isolated testimonies to an extent and with an ease never before possible. The #MeToo movement provides a prime example of how such pooling of individual stories, in large enough numbers, can fuel political movements, fortify a sense of solidarity and community, and compel public reckoning by bringing important issues into mainstream consciousness.

In this timely and important study, Helga Lenart-Cheng has uncovered the antecedents of this phenomenon and provided a historical and critical analysis of this seemingly new but in fact deeply rooted tradition. Story Revolutions features a rich variety of case studies, from eighteenth-century memoir collections to contemporary Web 2.0 databases, including memoir contests, digital story-maps, crowd-sourced Covid diaries, and AI-assisted life writing. It spans the Enlightenment, the 1930s, and the twenty-first century—three historical periods marked by a convergence of mass movements and new methods of data collection that led to a boom in activism based in the aggregation and communication of stories. Ultimately, this book offers readers a critical perspective on the concept of community itself, with incisive reflections on what it means to use storytelling to build democracy in the twenty-first century.

Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age

Robert Higney

How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation, revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, law, and beyond.

In readings of figures from the works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In these narratives—addressing imperial administrations, global financial competition, women’s entry into the professions, colonial nationalism, and wartime espionage—we are shown the generative power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive involvement of individuals in collective life.

Institutional Character: Collectivity, Individuality, and the Modernist Novel

Cristina Rodriguez

Immigrant communities evince particular and deep relationship to place. Building on this self-evident premise, Walk the Barrio adds the less obvious claim that to write about place you must experience place. Thus, in this book about immigrants, writing, and place, Cristina Rodriguez walks neighborhood streets, talks to immigrants, interviews authors, and puts herself physically in the spaces that she seeks to understand.

The word barrio first entered the English lexicon in 1833 and has since become a commonplace not only of American speech but of our literary imagination. Indeed, what draws Rodriguez to the barrios of Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and others is the work of literature that was fueled and inspired by those neighborhoods. Walk the Barrio explores the ways in which authors William Archila, Richard Blanco, Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, Salvador Plascencia, Héctor Tobar, and Helena María Viramontes use their U.S. hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration.

Asking how these writers innovate upon or break the rules of genre to render in words an embodied experience of the barrio, Rodriguez considers, for example, how the spatial map of New Brunswick impacts the mobility of Díaz’s female characters, or how graffiti influences the aesthetics of Viramontes’s novels. By mapping each text’s fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references in what she calls "barriographies," Rodriguez reveals connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy.

This first-person, interdisciplinary approach presents an innovative model for literary studies as it sheds important light on the ways in which transnationalism transforms the culture of each Latinx barrio, effecting shifts in gender roles, the construction of the family, definitions of social normativity, and racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic identifications.

Walk the Barrio: The Streets of Twenty-First-Century Transnational Latinx Literature

Lauren S. Cardon

It’s often said that we are what we wear. Tracing an American trajectory in fashion, Lauren Cardon shows how we become what we wear. Over the twentieth century, the American fashion industry diverged from its roots in Paris, expanding and attempting to reach as many consumers as possible. Fashion became a tool for social mobility. During the late twentieth century, the fashion industry offered something even more valuable to its consumers: the opportunity to explore and perform. The works Cardon examines—by Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, and Aleshia Brevard, among others—illustrate how American fashion, with its array of possibilities, has offered a vehicle for curating public personas. Characters explore a host of identities as fashion allows them to deepen their relationships with ethnic or cultural identity, to reject the social codes associated with economic privilege, or to forge connections with family and community. These temporary transformations, or performances, show that identity is a process constantly negotiated and questioned, never completely fixed.

Fashioning Character: Style, Performance, and Identity in Contemporary American Literature

Daniel Worden

With the ascendancy of neoliberalism in American culture beginning in the 1960s, the political structures governing private lives became more opaque and obscure. Neoliberal Nonfictions argues that a new style of documentary art emerged to articulate the fissures between individual experience and reality in the era of finance capitalism. 

In this wide-ranging study, Daniel Worden touches on issues ranging from urban poverty and criminal justice to environmental collapse and international politics. He examines the impact of local struggles and global markets on music, from D. A. Pennebaker’s infamous Dylan documentary Dont Look Back to Kendrick Lamar’s breakthrough album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. He details the emergence of the hustler as an icon of neoliberal individualism in Jay-Z’s autobiography Decoded, Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcom X, and Hunter S. Thompson’s "gonzo" journalism. He looks at how contemporary works such as Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Red Parts and Taryn Simon’s photography series The Innocents challenge the moral simplifications of traditional true crime writing. In his conclusion, he explores the dominance of memoir as a literary mode in the neoliberal era, particularly focusing on works by Joan Didion and Dave Eggers.

Documentary has become the aesthetic of our age, harnessing the irreconcilable distance between individual and society as a site for aesthetic experimentation across media, from journalism and photography to memoir, music, and film. Both a symptom of and a response to the emergence of economic neoliberalism, the documentary aesthetic is central to how we understand ourselves and our world today.

Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z

Len Gutkin

The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precedents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller. 

 As defined in the period between the fin de siècle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wilde’s decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernism’s negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy. 

 Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, Dandyism reveals the Victorian dandy’s legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature.

Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present

Marian Eide

If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground than that of the twentieth century. From the trench poetry of World War I and Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the post-colonial novels of southern Asia and the anti-apartheid plays of the South African Market Theater, writers have married beauty and horror. This "century of trauma" produced writing at once saturated in political violence and complicated by the ethics of aesthetic representation. Stretching across genres and the globe, Terrible Beauty charts a course of aesthetic reconciliation between empathy and evil in the great literature of the twentieth century.

The "violent aesthetic"—a category the author traces back to Plato and Nietzsche—accommodates the pleasure people take not only in destruction itself but also in its rendering. As readers, we oscillate between a fascination with atrocity and an ethical imperative to bear witness. Arguing for the immersive experience of literature as particularly conducive to ethical contemplation, Marian Eide plumbs the aesthetic power and ethical purpose of this creative tension. By invoking the reader as complicit—both stricken witness and enthralled voyeur— Terrible Beauty sheds new light on the relationship between violence, literature, and the moral burdens of art.