SUP Literary Studies

SUP Literary Studies http://www.sup.org/rss/literature.xml The latest titles from Stanford University Press en-us Copyright 2008 Stanford University Press webmaster@www.sup.org (Webmaster) Ends of Enlightenment Ends of Enlightenment John Bender "For some critics, the genre of collected essays does not flatter: it highlights the repetition and limitations of their analytic procedures. For John Bender, however, it's a showcase for his remarkable mix of conceptual flexibility and archival precision. Bender at his best is our best index to the extraordinary efflorescence of eighteenth-century studies at the turn into the new millennium. His work has transformed our understanding of the emergence of the novel from fluctuating fields of 'fact' and 'fiction,' the fate and ongoing power of rhetoric within shifting social and communication systems, and the reconstituting of knowledge into its modern forms and organization. The understanding of Enlightenment that emerges from these essays—and from the cross-currents generated by their being published together—provides that historical moment with an unprecedented purchase on the present. Bender's oeuvre is—in its accuracy and usefulness—an essential handbook for those of us who care about the legacy of Enlightenment."—Clifford Siskin, New York University "John Bender's writing on enlightenment culture has been a major inspiration for many years. Many of these essays are classics, and all repay close attention. Whether writing about anatomy or hypothesis, Hume's sentences or game theory in Laclos, Bender combines formal, socio-historical, and visual analysis into a unique wellspring for work in eighteenth-century studies. The collection is a real boon for the field and should be on the shelf of every one of its scholars."—Jonathan Kramnick, Rutgers University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1711">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment. John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University and a former Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. His books include Imagining the Penitentiary (winner of the 1987 Gottschalk Prize) and, with Michael Marrinan, of Regimes of Description (2005) and The Culture of Diagram (2010). http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=1711 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=1711 After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi's Italy After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi's Italy Alessia Ricciardi "There is no sweetness, lightness, weakness, or softness in Ricciardi's indictment, but hard facts and bitter truths piled up to heavy conclusions: Italy's intellectual life is the very culprit of a historical process of progressive civic and social degeneration that has led to the catastrophe that many have called Berlusconi's Italy. A very courageous book."—Roberto M. Dainotto Duke University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=21786">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> This book chronicles the demise of the supposedly leftist Italian cultural establishment during the long 1980s. During that time, the nation's literary and intellectual vanguard managed to lose the prominence handed it after the end of World War II and the defeat of Fascism. What emerged instead was a uniquely Italian brand of cultural capital that deliberately avoided any critical questioning of the prevailing order. Ricciardi criticizes the development of this new hegemonic arrangement in film, literature, philosophy, and art criticism. She focuses on several turning points: Fellini's futile, late-career critique of Berlusconi-style commercial television, Calvino's late turn to reactionary belletrism, Vattimo's nihilist and conservative responses to French poststructuralism, and Bonito Oliva's movement of art commodification, Transavanguardia. Alessia Ricciardi is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Northwestern University. Her book, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford, 2003), won the MLA's 2004 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=21786 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=21786 Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism Jeffrey T. Nealon "This is a work of very considerable importance. Now perhaps more than at any other time, culture and the economy constitute a seamless whole: everything can be given its price. Nealon poses the question: if postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, what is the cultural logic that has accompanied our current regime of accumulation? His answer is novel and ingenious."—Kenneth Surin, Duke University "Post-Postmodernism is Jeffrey Nealon in full flow: biting, smart, funny, and demonstrating his rare ability to combine philosophical insights with the most irreverent aspects of the popular. He propels us into thought through capital, through the popular, through the philosophical, through the political. Nealon has much to teach us, and he does so in splendid fashion."—Grant Farred, Cornell University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=21791">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era. Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation. Jeffrey T. Nealon is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993), Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), The Theory Toolbox (2003), and Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford 2008). http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=21791 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=21791 Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies Celine Parreñas Shimizu "An utterly original examination of Asian American masculinity on the silver screen, Straightjacket Sexualities is a critical tour-de-force that reveals cinema to be an ethical event. It offers a theory of responsibility in the face of vulnerability and persecution to encourage the emergence of new and better forms of manhood."—David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania "An exciting contribution to Asian American, film, and gender and sexuality studies, one which many will find liberatory as well. A perfect sequel to her book on Asian American female sexualities."—David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20469">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies. Hollywood has made clear that Asian American men lack the qualities inherent to the heroic heterosexual male. This restricting, circumscribed vision of masculinity—a straitjacketing, according to author Celine Parreñas Shimizu—aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen. Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies looks to cinematic history to reveal the dynamic ways Asian American men, from Bruce Lee to Long Duk Dong, create and claim a variety of masculinities. Representations of love, romance, desire, and lovemaking show how Asian American men fashion manhoods that negotiate the dynamics of self and other, expanding our ideas of sexuality. The unique ways in which Asian American men express intimacy is powerfully represented onscreen, offering distinct portraits of individuals struggling with group identities. Rejecting "macho" men, these movies stake Asian American manhood on the notion of caring for, rather than dominating, others. Straitjacket Sexualities identifies a number of moments in the movies wherein masculinity is figured anew. By looking at intimate relations on screen, power as sexual prowess and brute masculinity is redefined, giving primacy to the diverse ways Asian American men experience complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent genders and sexualities. Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a filmmaker and film scholar. She is the author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (2007), winner of the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Prize from the Association for Asian American Studies. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20469 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20469 Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels Jinqi Ling "With this intellectually rigorous, original study of the complete fictional oeuvre of Karen Tei Yamashita, Jinqi Ling produces the first book-length treatment of a novelist whose audacious, ingenious visions of the Americas and of the contemporary crisscrossed globe have awaited just such rich, sustained attention."—Caroline Rody, Professor of English, University of Virginia "In addition to being the best sustained study of Yamashita, Across Meridians is an excellent contribution to literary studies more broadly and to Asian American studies. The argument to add a South-North axis to the largely East-West axis of Asian American studies has never been articulated with greater clarity and usefulness. This book is highly sophisticated theoretically, and also engages in very compelling textual analyses. Its offers a cogent, unique contribution to the cultural study of postmodern transnationalism in literary and cultural studies that promises to be highly influential."—T.V. Reed, Buchanan Distinguished Professor of American Studies and English, Washington State University, author of The Art of Protest, and manager of culturalpolitics.net <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=21314">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways. In Across Meridians, Jinqi Ling offers readers the most critically engaged examination to date of Yamashita's literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, Ling's study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North-South vector into the East-West conceptual paradigm, Ling highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, Ling designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, Ling sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, he argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice. Jinqi Ling is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=21314 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=21314 The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature Christopher Lee "The Semblance of Identity makes an impressive contribution to Asian American studies by providing a fresh look at the field's uneasy relationship with the 'identity politics' from which it was born. Lee offers an elegant, theoretically sophisticated picture of what 'post-identity' Asian American studies might look like."—Timothy Yu, University of Wisconsin-Madison <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=18676">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization. This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits. Christopher Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=18676 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=18676 The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel Gary Saul Morson "This shrewdly analytic, generously appreciative inventory of a dozen microgenres breaks lots of new ground. Morson not only discriminates dictum from witticism, maxim from summons and thought, but also shows how aphorists in a wealth of cultures have invoked generic tradition and infighting to score points. He furthermore illuminates the role played by aphorisms, and the outlooks they epitomize, in the narrative shaping of works from Oedipus and Job to Middlemarch and Boswell's Johnson."—Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia "Gary Saul Morson has created a passionate, imaginative book, full of energy and wisdom. The Long and Short of It is an exciting, horizon-opening essay on literary short forms that provide an interface between literature and philosophy."—Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20199">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is also much more. In this exploration of the shortest literary works—wise sayings, proverbs, witticisms, sardonic observations about human nature, pithy evocations of mystery, terse statements regarding ultimate questions—Gary Saul Morson argues passionately for the importance of these short genres not only to scholars but also to general readers. We are fascinated by how brief works evoke a powerful sense of life in a few words, which is why we browse quotation anthologies and love to repeat our favorites. Arguing that all short genres are short in their own way, Morson explores the unique form of brevity that each of them develops. Apothegms (Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Wittgenstein) describe the universe as ultimately unknowable, offering not answers but ever deeper questions. Dicta (Spinoza, Marx, Freud) create the sense that unsolvable enigmas have at last been resolved. Sayings from sages and sacred texts assure us that goodness is rewarded, while sardonic maxims (Ecclesiastes, Nietzsche, George Eliot) uncover the self-deceptions behind such comforting illusions. Just as witticisms display the power of mind, "witlessisms" (William Spooner, Dan Quayle, the persona assumed by Mark Twain) astonish with their spectacular stupidity. Nothing seems further from these short works than novels and epics, but the shortest genres often set the tone for longer ones, which, in turn, contain brilliant examples of short forms. Morson shows that short genres contribute important insights into the history of literature and philosophical thought. Once we grasp the role of aphorisms in Herodotus, Samuel Johnson, Dostoevsky, and even Tolstoy, we see their masterpieces in an entirely new light. Gary Saul Morson is the Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. He has published nine books on major Russian authors, the human experience of time, and the cultural role of quotations, most recently The Words of Others: From Quotation to Culture (2011). Morson received a lifetime achievement award by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (1994) won the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20199 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20199 Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique Edited by Michele M. Mason and Helen J.S. Lee "Reading Colonial Japan is a splendid collection of colonial writings in translation, paired with critical essays that address historical and theoretical concerns in original and engaging ways. It is an exceptional achievement and a truly important addition to cultural studies, Asian studies, history, and the study of colonialism/postcolonialism, migration, and translation."—Sabine Frühstück, Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=12345">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> By any measure, Japan's modern empire was formidable. The only major non-western colonial power in the 20th century, Japan controlled a vast area of Asia and numerous archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. The massive extraction of resources and extensive cultural assimilation policies radically impacted the lives of millions of Asians and Micronesians, and the political, economic, and cultural ramifications of this era are still felt today. The Japanese empire lasted from 1869-1945. During this time, how was the Japanese imperial project understood, imagined, and lived? Reading Colonial Japan is a unique anthology that aims to deepen knowledge of Japanese colonialism(s) by providing an eclectic selection of translated Japanese primary sources and analytical essays that illuminate Japan's many and varied colonial projects. The primary documents highlight how central cultural production and dissemination were to the colonial effort, while accentuating the myriad ways colonialism permeated every facet of life. The variety of genres the explored includes legal documents, children's literature, cookbooks, serialized comics, and literary texts by well-known authors of the time. These cultural works, produced by a broad spectrum of "ordinary" Japanese citizens (a housewife in Manchuria, settlers in Korea, manga artists and fiction writers in mainland Japan, and so on), functioned effectively to reinforce the official policies that controlled and violated the lives of the colonized throughout Japan's empire. By making available and analyzing a wide-range of sources that represent "media" during the Japanese colonial period, Reading Colonial Japan draws attention to the powerful role that language and imagination played in producing the material realities of Japanese colonialism. Michele M. Mason is assistant professor of Japanese literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the co-producer and interpreter for the short documentary film Witness to Hiroshima (2010). Helen J.S. Lee is an assistant professor of Japanese studies at the Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=12345 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=12345 Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography Aris Fioretos Translated by Tomas Tranæus "For some years the time has been ripe for a literary biography of Nelly Sachs. Now these thorough, thoughtful, deeply studied pages, enlivened by remarkable images, should become a definitive source. Along with her close comrade Paul Celan, though not wholly like him, Sachs draws us into a molten history we forget at our peril."—John Felstiner, author of Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, and Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20748">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> This richly illustrated biography is the first book in English to chronicle the life of Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature. The book follows Sachs from her secluded years in Berlin as the only child of assimilated German Jews, through her last-minute flight from the Nazis in 1940, to her exile in "peaceful Sweden"—a time of poverty and isolation, but also of growing fame. Enriched by over 300 images of Sachs's manuscripts, photographs, and possessions, Flight and Metamorphosis not only offers detailed insights into the contexts of Sachs's formation as a writer, but also looks at themes of trauma and testimony in her central works. Aris Fioretos draws upon many previously unknown manuscripts, documents, medical records, and photos to produce the first reliably detailed narratives of Sachs's foundational experiences: her teenage years when she experienced the unrequited love later designated as the source for her entire oeuvre; her involvement with the Jewish Cultural League—seven years marked by mounting terror but also by her first public recognition as a writer; and her exposure to the radical Modernism of Swedish poetry in the 1940s. The book further describes the years of public recognition, addresses the paranoia that marked Sachs's final decade, and scrutinizes her close but complicated friendship with Paul Celan. An interview with Sachs's dear friend Margaretha Holmqvist provides touching insights into both her life in the 1960s and the events leading up to the Nobel Prize. Throughout, the book emphasizes the singularity of Sachs's accomplishments as a writer and the exemplarity of her existential situation—as a woman, as an exile, and—as she herself said—"a battleground." A professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, Aris Fioretos was educated at Stockholm and Yale Universities. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, most recently from the Swedish Academy and All Souls College, Oxford, he has published several novels and book-length essays and has rendered the works of Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish. His latest, award-winning novel is entitled The Last Greek (2009). Fioretos is also the general editor of the first commented edition of the complete works of Nelly Sachs in German. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20748 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20748 Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime Robert Zaller "Robert Zaller's book sets out to be the fullest and most detailed explication of Jeffers' large body of poetry and his literary career, and it delivers on that ambition. It is the best single critical book about Jeffers and sets a benchmark that will be difficult to meet, let alone surpass."—Albert Gelpi, Emeritus, Stanford University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=10149">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works. Robert Zaller is Professor of History at Drexel University and a leading scholar of Robinson Jeffers. His previous works on Jeffers include The Cliffs of Solitude and an edited volume, Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers. He is also the author of The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (Stanford 2007). http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=10149 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=10149 Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance Jason Puskar "Accident Society is skillfully executed and makes important contributions to existing debates over the role of individual agency and moral responsibility in the age of incorporation leading up to the New Deal. Puskar uncovers original historical contexts to buttress new readings of crucial authors and texts."—Maurice S. Lee, Boston University "The intellectual range of this book is staggering. Each chapter not only shifts the discourse about a particular literary text, finding hidden illuminations, but also radiates new possibilities for understanding the social, philosophical, and political coordinates that situate the texts. It is truly a brilliant book."—Eric Wertheimer, Arizona State University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20749">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became "car accidents" and "industrial accidents." During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own "mutual society." Accident Society reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance. Jason Puskar is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20749 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20749 Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship Michael Anesko "Michael Anesko's important, fiercely witty book on the mediation—manipulation—of James's works and reputation by his heirs and successive scholars is hard to put down. Not only Jamesians but lovers of literary gossip will relish his treasure trove of archival revelations about the keepers of the Jamesian flame, from Percy Lubbock to Leon Edel. This inside study of the politics of literary institutions is certain to become a classic, of a very remarkable kind."—Philip Horne, University College London "Michael Anesko combines scholarship with the writer's craft to engage both the seasoned Jamesian and the educated general reader. The story he tells is significant and compelling: it promises to change once again the way that we understand Henry James, all while opening a window onto academe's seamier side."— Greg Zacharias, Creighton University "For Jamesians, this is a page-turner, a must-have. It will also absorb the general reader in a compelling narrative that has everything: the fall and rise of a major literary figure; complicated money-making deals, sexual secrets, family dynamics, contention over intellectual property rights, self-protecting Boston/Harvard hierarchies, conspiracies and cover-ups, and power-grabs by an accomplished villain."—Martha Banta, University of California, Los Angeles "As this extraordinary work of scholarship shows, it would be family, friends, publishers, biographers, and critics who strove to perpetuate one or another 'Henry James' in accordance with their view of the dead author. Anesko gives a vivid presence to these secondary actors like the novelist's nephew, Percy Lubbock (the first editor of James's letters), and Leon Edel, whose successful campaign to obtain and retain exclusive rights to publish James's letters and biography is a scandal of modern scholarship only now being exposed in detail."—Millicent Bell, Emerita, Boston University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=18378">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Henry James defied posterity to disturb his bones: he was adamant that his legacy be based exclusively on his publications and that his private life and writings remain forever private. Despite this, almost immediately after his death in 1916 an intense struggle began among his family and his literary disciples to control his posthumous reputation, a struggle that was continued by later generations of critics and biographers. Monopolizing the Master gives a blow-by-blow account of this conflict, which aroused intense feelings of jealousy, suspicion, and proprietorship among those who claimed to be the just custodians of James's literary legacy. With an unprecedented amount of new evidence now available, Michael Anesko reveals the remarkable social, political, and sexual intrigue that inspired—and influenced—the deliberate construction of the Legend of the Master. Michael Anesko is Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. He has published extensively on Anglo-American literary culture, including "Friction with the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986), Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (1997), and The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Monsieur de l'Aubépine and His Second Empire Critics (2011). He is a General Editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of The Complete Fiction of Henry James. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=18378 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=18378 Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America Bakirathi Mani "Working with a truly innovative archive, Mani compellingly argues that merely 'adding on' South Asians to the litany of ethnic and national-origin identifications that circulate under 'Asian America' is thoroughly inadequate to pursuing the study of racialization in ways that take seriously the intimacy and depth of the relationship between the local and the global. —Kandice Chuh, CUNY/The Graduate Center "An elegantly written and trenchantly argued book."—Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "An important contribution to the burgeoning field of South Asian American studies, Bakirathi Mani's Aspiring to Home easily traverses a range of cultural practices, moving seamlessly between genres (literature, film, performance) and methodologies (textual analysis, ethnography). Mani compelling transforms our understanding of seemingly transparent assimilationist narratives produced by South Asian Americans in the US. These contradictions, for Mani, point to the ways in which middle class South Asian Americans both collude with and renegotiate dominant notions of belonging in multiple national spaces. Thus Mani argues that we must reconceptualize Asian American studies beyond a familiar mapping of US colonialism in East and South East Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but simultaneously through US and British imperial interests in South Asia."—Gayatri Gopinath, New York University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=9410">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> What does it mean to belong? How are twenty-first-century diasporic subjects fashioning identities and communities that bind them together? Aspiring to Home examines these questions with a focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Advancing a theory of locality to explain the means through which immigrants of varying regional, religious, and linguistic backgrounds experience what it means to belong, Bakirathi Mani shows how ethnicity is produced through the relationship between domestic racial formations and global movements of class and capital. Aspiring to Home focuses on popular cultural works created by first- and second-generation South Asians from 1999–2009, including those by author Jhumpa Lahiri and filmmaker Mira Nair, as well as public events such as the Miss India U.S.A. pageant and the Broadway musical Bombay Dreams. Analyzing these diverse productions through an interdisciplinary framework, Mani weaves literary readings with ethnography to unravel the constraints of form and genre that shape how we read diasporic popular culture. Bakirathi Mani is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at Swarthmore College. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=9410 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=9410