Downtown Canada

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Derek C. Maus

Overview: Although 2002 MacArthur Fellowship recipient Colson Whitehead ardently resists overarching categorizations of his work, Derek C. Maus argues in this volume that Whitehead's first six books are linked by a careful balance between adherence to and violation of the wisdom of past generations. Whitehead bids readers to come along with him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine accepted notions of truth. Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's fiction from his 1999 novel The Intuitionist through 2011's Zone One. In his choice of literary forms, Whitehead attempts to revitalize the limiting formulas to which they have been reduced by first imitating and then violating the conventions of those genres and sub-genres. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, and/or malevolent aspects of American culture. Although only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race often takes a place of centrality in his works and, as such, serves as the prime example of how Whitehead asks his readers to revisit their assumptions about meanings and values. By jumbling the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, and the zombie apocalypse, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings of many of the long-lasting stories through which Americans have defined themselves. Some of the stories Whitehead focuses on are explicitly literary in nature, but he more frequently directs his attention toward the historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

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Thomas Fink

"This study analyzes the work of social poets who hail from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and geographical locations in the United States. These figures, who emerged as poets in the last two decades, utilize a diversity of aesthetic strategies to address issues of in/visibility, the erasure and reconstruction of history, and issues of inclusivity and exclusivity in formations of community. Issues of community raised involve race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual preference."--BOOK JACKET.

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Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

Interviews, excerpts from diaries and letters, newspaper accounts, profiles of famous individuals, and pictures from family albums portray the Cuban American experience.

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Claire Hoertz Badaracco

Between the turn of the century and about 1940, dramatic changes took place in both British and American print culture. Publishers scrambled as new markets developed or were created through advertising. Lithographers and designers helped establish the preeminence of "modern" aesthetics. And the centuries-old printing industry was transformed by unprecedented technological advances. In Trading Words Claire Hoertz Badaracco examines these fascinating developments in an engaging study of the economics of literary design. She investigates how writers sold their poetry by marketing their reputations, how book printers used American literature to break the long hold of European classics on the mass-market literary imagination, and how direct mail and advertising made or broke subscription publishing enterprises during the 1930s. Drawing on rare books and manuscript materials from distinguished collections in the history of printing and marketing, Badaracco freshly surveys the development of twentieth-century "mass culture" and reinterprets the philosophies, ideals, and schemes of the poets, typographers, and publishers who succeeded in capturing the public imagination.