Toward a Latina feminism of the Americas

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Laura Rattray

"During her lifetime, Edith Wharton was one of America's most popular and prolific writers, publishing over forty books and winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But after her death her work slipped out of favour, and it is only in the last thirty years that her reputation as a literary heavyweight and a great writer has recovered." "Bringing together twelve leading Wharton scholars from Europe and North America, this volume offers the first ever collection of essays on Wharton's 1913 text, The Custom of the Country. Described as 'her greatest book' by Hermione Lee in her 2007 biography of the writer, and listed by Wharton herself at the end of a long and prolific career as one of her own favorite works, The Custom of the Country arguably remains the author's most complex and controversial novel. The contributions to this collection demonstrate the continuing evolution of Wharton scholarship within modern critical approaches." --Book Jacket.

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Amy L. Blair

"A person who reads a book for self-improvement rather than aesthetic pleasure is 'reading up.' Reading Up is Amy Blair's engaging study of popular literary critics who promoted reading generally and specific books as vehicles for acquiring cultural competence and economic mobility. Combining methodologies from the history of the book and the history of reading, to mass-cultural studies, reader-response criticism, reception studies, and formalist literary analysis, Blair shows how such critics influenced the choices of striving readers and popularized some elite writers. Framed by an analysis of Hamilton Wright Mabie's role promoting the concept of reading up during his ten-year stint as the cultivator of literary taste for the highly popular Ladies' Home Journal, Reading Up reveals how readers flocked to literary works they would be expected to dislike. Blair shows that while readers could be led to certain books by a trusted adviser, they frequently followed their own path in interpreting them in unexpected ways"--Amazon.com.

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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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Carlos Huamán (coordinador

Se reúne diversos estudios relacionados con el problema de la representación oral y/o escrita de la heterogénea realidad latinoamericana, los cuales ofrecen interpretaciones interdisciplinarias que tienen como eje fundamental la literatura, pero que desbordan en la etnografía, la antropología, la lingüística y la historia.