Labour Of Laziness In Twentieth Century American Literature

This text argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness.

This text argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness.

A study of a key modernist form, its theory, practice and legacy.

Explores how American writers articulate the complexity of twentieth-century suburbiaExamines the ways American writers from the 1960s to the present - including John Updike, Richard Ford, Gloria Naylor, Jeffrey Eugenides, D. J. Waldie, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Daz and John Barth - have sought to articulate the complexity of the US suburbsAnalyses the relationships between literary form and the spatial and temporal dimensions of the environment Scrutinises increasingly prominent literary and cultural forms including novel sequences, memoir, drama, graphic novels and short story cyclesCombines insights drawn from recent historiography of the US suburbs and cultural geography with analyses of over twenty-five texts to provide a fresh outlook on the literary history of American suburbiaThe Literature of Suburban Change examines the diverse body of cultural material produced since 1960 responding to the defining habitat of twentieth-century USA: the suburbs. Martin Dines analyses how writers have innovated across a range of forms and genres - including novel sequences, memoirs, plays, comics and short story cycles - in order to make sense of the complexity of suburbia. Drawing on insights from recent historiography and cultural geography, Dines offers a new perspective on the literary history of the US suburbs. He argues that by giving time back to these apparently timeless places, writers help reactivate the suburbs, presenting them not as fixed, finished and familiar but rather as living, multifaceted environments that are still in production and under exploration.

This book examines labour in the age of US hegemony through the art that has grappled with it; and, vice versa, developments in American culture as they have been shaped by work’s transformations over the last century. Describing the complex relations between cultural forms and the work practices, Art, Labour and American Life explores everything from Fordism to feminization, from white-collar ascendency to zero hours precarity, as these things have manifested in painting, performance art, poetry, fiction, philosophy and music. Labour, all but invisible in cultural histories of the period, despite the fact most Americans have spent most of their lives doing it, here receives an urgent re-emphasis, as we witness work’s radical redefinition across the world.

This book is first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production.

Analysing the ubiquity of the small town in fiction of the mid-century US South, Living Jim Crow is the first extended scholarly study to explore how authors mobilised this setting as a tool for racial resistance.

A revisionist reading of Fitzgerald's short stories through the lens of popular culture from the 1910s to the 1930sF. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered primarily as a novelist, but he wrote nearly two hundred short stories for popular magazines such as the widely-read Saturday Evening Post. These are vividly infused with the new popular culture of the early twentieth century, from jazz to motion pictures. By exploring Fitzgerald's fascination with the intertwined spheres of dance, music, theatre and film, this book demonstrates how Fitzgerald innovatively imported practices from other popular cultural media into his short stories, showing how jazz age culture served as more than mere period detail in his work. Key FeaturesInterdisciplinary formal and thematic analysis of popular cultural references in Fitzgerald's short fictionOffers fresh readings of longstanding concepts in Fitzgerald studies, such as his 'double vision'Contributes to the growing field of popular cultural studies of modernist authors