Dismembering The American Dream

"A detailed study of Yates's novels and stories"-- Provided by publisher.

Richard Yates (1926-1992) has been described as a "writer's writer" but has never received the critical attention befitting that designation. Firmly rooted in the zeitgeist of 1950s, his work remains startlingly relevant, addressing themes of American identity, the nature of marriage and relationships between men and women, and what it means to get ahead in a society entranced by a flawed American Dream. This collection of new essays is the first to focus on this under-appreciated author. It opens up his body of work for a new generation of readers, and positions Yates as a writer of significance in the American tradition.

Sex, Gender, and Sexualities in the Plays of Edward Albee contains a general introduction and eleven essays by American and European Albee scholars on Albee’s depictions of gender relations, sexual relations, monogamy, child-rearing, and homosexuality.

"Drawing on a body of literature published between 1945 and 2016, Contested Terrain proposes a more expansive treatment of suburban fiction as a discourse that operates within national and transnational geographies. Wilhite argues that the suburbs and suburban narratives reflect the latest, perhaps final outpost in the tradition of U.S. regionalism. Although he may be accused of simply substituting one outmoded methodology for another, such a critique depends on misreading regionalism as either a sub-literary genre or, as Roberto Dainotto suggests, a pernicious political ideology that opposes modernity and suppresses difference in the naive pursuit of "grounded, rooted, natural, authentic values shared by a true community." In opposition to such withering appraisals, Contested Terrain demonstrates that, as both a literary discourse and a mode of geopolitical analysis, regionalism clarifies the fraught relationship between isolationism and imperialism that has shaped U.S. residential geography and, in turn, helps us rethink the role literary texts play in the postwar project of suburban nation building"--

The first "narrative history" traces the thread that binds the dreams and aspirations of most Americans together, exploring shared history and sacred texts--the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence--in search of the origins of these ideas.

Winner of the 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies “All-Electric” Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the “all-electric” home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to “give back” time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or “return” them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.

America was discovered almost by accident.