...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

... 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...

... 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...

...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...

...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...

...: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse . Ed. Paula C. Barnes and Australia Tarver. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press. 2006. 300 pp. $52.50. Book Reviews Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America. By Jennifer J. Baker...

... American 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...

...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...

...Jordan Alexander Stein Stein's essay argues that within the inquiry called “the history of sexuality,” a critical preoccupation with the materiality of bodies has occasioned some inattention to the experience and cultivation of sensations, which are clearly not reducible to somatic responses but...

...Scott Selisker This essay considers Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison's other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible...