Uneasy alliance : : twentieth-century American literature, culture and biography / / edited by Hans Bak.

• Superior document: Costerus New Series ; 150
• TeilnehmendeR: Bak, Hans,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden;, Boston : : BRILL,, 2004.
• Year of Publication: 2004
• Language: English
• Series: Costerus New Series ; 150.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Uneasy Alliance illuminates the recent search in literary studies for a new interface between textual and contextual readings. Written in tribute to G.A.M. Janssens, the twenty-one essays in the volume exemplify a renewed awareness of the paradoxical nature of literary texts both as works of literary art and as documents embedded in and functioning within a writer's life and culture. Together they offer fresh and often interdisciplinary perspectives on twentieth-century American writers of more or less established status (Henry James, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros) as well as on those who, for reasons of fashion, politics, ideology, or gender, have been unduly neglected (Booth Tarkington, Julia Peterkin, Robert Coates, Martha Gellhorn, Isabella Gardner, Karl Shapiro, the young Jewish-American writers, Julia Alvarez, and writers of popular crime and detective fiction). Exploring the fruitful interactions and uneasy alliance between literature and ethics, film, biography, gender studies, popular culture, avant-garde art, urban studies, anthropology and multicultural studies, together these essays testify to the ongoing pertinence of an approach to literature that is undogmatic, sensitive and sophisticated and that seeks to do justice to the complex interweavings of literature, culture and biography in twentieth-century American writing.

Table of Contents

Preface -- Gert BUELENS: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ethics in The Portrait of a Lady -- Peter RIETBERGEN: A Variety of Ambersons: Re-reading Booth Tarkington's and Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons -- Gonny van BEEK-van OVERBEEK: Stepping Through a Looking-Glass: The Worlds of Julia Peterkin (1880-1961) -- C.C. BARFOOT: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnets: Putting "Chaos into Fourteen Lines" -- Edward MARGOLIES: Portraits of Gotham: Twentieth-Century American Culture and the Writers of New York City -- Mathilde ROZA: American Literary Modernisms, Popular Culture and Metropolitan Mass Life: The Early Fiction of Robert M. Coates -- Richard S. KENNEDY: E.E. Cummings and Marion Morehouse: The Later Years -- Inez HOLLANDER-LAKE: Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998): Femme Fatale of American Letters -- Susan CASTILLO: Reading Signs: Epistemological Uncertainty and the Southern Grotesque in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood -- Diederik OOSTDIJK: "How Rough Can Editors Be?": Conrad Aiken, Edward Dahlberg, and Karl Shapiro in a Literary Row -- Marian JANSSEN: Postillion for Pegasus: Isabella Gardner and Poetry -- Jaap van der BENT: Nabokov's Unwanted Children: Lolita and the Writers of the Olympia Press -- René VERWAAIJEN: The Almighty's Own Purposes: Alfred Kazin's God and the American Writer -- Jan BAKKER: Saul Bellow and the Actual -- Derek RUBIN: Between Prominence and Obscurity: Jewish-American Writers at the Center of a Decentralized Literature -- Kathleen M. ASHLEY: Toni Morrison's Tricksters -- Hans BAK: Site of Passage: The City as a Place of Exile in Contemporary North-American Multicultural Literature -- Mary A. McCAY: Sandra Cisneros: Crossing Borders -- Loes NAS: Border Crossings in Latina Narrative: Julia Alvarez' How the García Girls Lost Their Accents -- Theo D'HAEN: Stalking Multiculturalism: Historical Sleuths at the End of the Twentieth Century -- Hans BERTENS: The English Tradition in Contemporary American Crime Fiction -- Notes on Contributors.