Reconstructing the family in contemporary American fiction

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Jeannette Batz Cooperman

The Broom Closet explores the sacred, psychological, erotic, and sometimes murderous power of housework, using surprising examples from postfeminist novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. By juxtaposing the novels and their authors' lives with general social and historical context, the book outlines the many ways domestic ritual continues to shape women's consciousnessand either foil or reflect women's creativity.

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Frederick Moehn

Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture. Contemporary Carioca introduces a generation of Rio-based musicians who collaboratively have reinvigorated Brazilian genres, such as samba and maracatu, through juxtaposition with international influences, including rock, techno, and funk. He describes how these artists manage their careers, having reclaimed some control from record labels. Examining the specific meanings that their fusions have in the Carioca scene, he explains that musical mixture is not only intertwined with nationalist discourses of miscegenation, but also with the experience of being middle-class in a country confronting neoliberal models of globalization. Moehn offers vivid depictions of Rio musicians as they creatively combine and reconcile local realities with global trends and exigencies.

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Alexandra W. Schultheis

"In Regenerative Fiction, Alexandra W. Schultheis brings postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories together to explore this tumultuous zone, a place that is at once cutting edge, open wound, and sutured scar. This analysis of the authors' political and aesthetic strategies reveals fissures in the ruling ideology of subject and nation as well as immanent resistance to it."--Jacket.

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George Monteiro

Of the great epic poets in the Western tradition, Luis Vaz de Camoes (c. 1524-1580) remains perhaps the least known outside his native Portugal, and his influence on literature in English has not been fully recognized. In this major work of comparative scholarship, George Monteiro thus breaks new ground. Combining textual analysis with cultural investigation, he focuses on English-language writers whose vision and expression have been sharpened by their varied responses to Camoes. Introduced to English readers in 1655, Camoes's work from the beginning appealed strongly to writers. His Os Lustadas so affected William Hayley's theory of the epic that he commissioned William Blake to paint Camoes's portrait and advised poet Joel Barlow to recast his New World epic along Camonean lines. Robert Southey's disappointment with Lord Strangford's translation of Camoes encouraged him to try his own versions. And the young Elizabeth Barrett's Camonean poems inspired Edgar Allan Poe to appropriate elements from the same source. Herman Melville's reading of Camoes bore fruit in his career-long borrowings from the Portuguese poet. Longfellow, T. W. Higginson, and Emily Dickinson read and championed Camoes. And Camoes as epicist and love poet is an eminence grise in several of Elizabeth Bishop's strongest Brazilian poems. Southern African writers have interpreted and reinterpreted Adamastor, Camoes's Spirit of the Cape, as a symbol of a dangerous and mysterious Africa and an emblem of European imperialism.