Translating Mount Fuji

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Renée R. Curry

"Just as the cultural background of readers shapes how they respond to texts, the context in which writers live shapes what they write. When a context is dominant within a culture, the effects of that context upon an author may be taken for granted and thus overlooked. Race is a powerful factor in shaping literary works. Literature by black writers, for example, often reflects the experiences of African Americans. At the same time, though perhaps less obviously, literature by white writers may similarly reflect the experience of being white. This book argues that H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath wrote from an unproclaimed dominant white perspective that becomes evident in their poetry. Loosely delineated, writing white constitutes writing authored from an acknowledged or unacknowledged white perspective; writing that implies or explicitly delivers the concept of whiteness to a text; writing that remains unconcerned with white racial politics internal and external to the text; and writing that uses the word white to maintain ideological systems of mastery and dichotomy. This book examines numerous poems in terms of whiteness. Each chapter places one poet in the larger context of historical and cultural racial events prevalent during the time of her writing and explores the particular poems created and published during that period." -- Amazon.com

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Jana Evans Braziel

"By exploring the breadth of Jamaica Kincaid's writings, this book reveals her work's transmutations of genre, specifically those of autobiography, biography, and history in relation to the forces of creation and destruction in the Caribbean. Jana Evans Braziel examines Kincaid's preoccupation with genealogy, genesis, and genocide in the Caribbean; her adaptations of biblical texts for her literary oeuvre; and her authorial deployments of the diabolic as frames for both rethinking the boundaries of genre and altering notions of subjectivity, objectivity, self, and other." --Book Jacket.

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Pamela Chester & Sibelan Forrester

Engendering Slavic Literatures breaks new ground in its investigation of gender and feminist issues in Croatian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian literary texts by both female and male writers. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches, film theory, and lesbian and gender theory, the authors interrogate the received notions of Western gender studies to see which can be usefully applied to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Slavic literary works. Motherhood and the relationships of mothers and daughters; the myths of selfhood that shape the autobiographies of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lidiia Ginzburg, and Lev Tolstoy; Polish Catholicism and sexuality; portrayals of landscape in verbal and visual art; and women writers' transgressive ventures into male bastions such as the love lyric and prose fiction are among the themes of this important and innovative volume.

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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.