...Nancy McCabe The American Essay in the American Century . By Stuckey-French Ned . Columbia : Univ. of Missouri Press . 2011 . xiv, 256 pp. $60.00 . Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans . By Aubry Timothy . Iowa City : Univ. of Iowa...

... Race and Culture . By Barnhart Bruce . Tuscaloosa : Univ. of Alabama Press . 2013 . 252 pp. Cloth , $49.95 ; e-book, $49.99 . Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America . By Rubin Joan Shelley . Amherst : Univ. of Massachusetts Press . 2013...

...Adalaide Morris Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions . By Bernstein Charles . Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press . 2011 . 282 pp . Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life . By Goble Mark . New York : Columbia Univ. Press . 2010 . xiii, 374 pp...

...Jed Rasula Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics . By Reed Brian M. . Tuscaloosa : Univ. of Alabama Press . 2012 . xxvii, 249 pp. Paper , $29.95 , e-book , $29.95 . Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s . By Houen Alex...

... the ferocious pressures of the particular moment. This extreme tension creates what Allen Tate, in his marvelous 1932 essay about Dickinson, says is ‘‘the perfect literary situation’’ that can produce ‘‘a special and perhaps the most distinguished kind of poet That situation, Tate argues, arises...

...R. John Williams Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia . By Wegner Phillip E. . New York : Peter Lang . 2014 . xix , 308 pp. Paper, $55.95 ; e-book, $55.95 . The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood . By...

...Alisha Gaines Duke University Press 2007 Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights . By Keith D. Leonard. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2006. ix, 283 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.50. New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender...

... narra- tives and to reenvisioning social change through aesthetics. When Connor pairs Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison in the chapter ‘‘Af- firming the Unity she practices some unifying work of her own, using Elli- son’s essays to corroborate Wright’s endeavors. Of course, at least since the...

.... New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2001. x, 283 pp. $47.50. Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora’s Box. By Anthony Dawahare. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 2003. xix, 161 pp. $37.00. South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. By...

... texts each mar- ket crisis produced—newspaper essays, congressional speeches, merchants’ memorials, credit reports, private letters, novels [and] short stories’’ (6). Where Critical Fictions falters is in its account of the mediations between the emotional and the economic that made their analogy...

...Rafael Pérez-Torres Duke University Press 2006 Narratives of Greater Mexico: Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders . By Héctor Calderón. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 2004. 312 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $22.95. Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature . By...

...Robert McRuer © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature . Ed. H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, and Heidi M. Rose. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. 2006. xxviii, 264 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $29.95...

...Franny Nudelman © 2009 by Duke University Press 2009 Passive Constitutions, or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby . By Branka Arsić. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press. 2007. 210 pp. $60.00. Impersonality: Seven Essays . By Sharon Cameron. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2007. xx, 260 pp. Cloth, $65.00...

...Hugh Egan © 2009 by Duke University Press 2009 Melville: The Making of the Poet . By Hershel Parker. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press. 2008. x, 238 pp. $32.95. Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation . Ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North...

...Susan Rosenbaum © 2009 by Duke University Press 2009 Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem . By Robert M. Dowling. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2007. ix, 200 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $20.00. Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School...

...Patrick Jagoda © 2009 by Duke University Press 2009 Postmodern American Literature and Its Other . By W. Lawrence Hogue. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2008. xvi, 212 pp. $45.00. Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database . By Alan Liu. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago...

...Rebecca Wanzo © 2010 by Duke University Press 2010 Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism . By bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press. 2006. 145 pp. Paper, $15.00. Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities . By Michael Bérubé. Chapel Hill: Univ. of...

...Everett Hamner Hamner's essay analyzes Richard Powers's novel Generosity: An Enhancement as an example of genomic fiction, a genre-bending science fiction subgenre focused on relationships between biology and identity. Prefacing this study with brief readings of novels by Michael Crichton and...

...Elizabeth Lloyd Oliphant Abstract This essay analyzes the mutually influential relationship between literary modernism and tourism as those two interests converged around the US Southwest in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers were drawn to the Southwest’s folk and Native American...

...Marion Rust This essay examines two versions of an essay by Adrienne Rich on Anne Bradstreet to argue that Rich's intervening relationship with Audre Lorde facilitated her development of a rhetorical technique I call additive emendation . This method allowed her to supplement the original essay so...