An inviting point of entrance into the truth seeking, genre defying novels of the award-winning authorIn 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it...

Contributions by GerShun Avilez, Lola Boorman, Thomas Britt, John Brooks, Phillip James Martinez Cortes, Derek DiMatteo, Tikenya Foster-Singletary, Alexandra Glavanakova, Erica-Brittany Horhn, Matthias Klestil, Abigail Jinju Lee, Derek C. Maus, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Derek Conrad Murray, Kinohi Nishikawa, Sarah O'Brien, Keyana Parks, and Emily Ruth RutterThe seventeen essays in Greater Atlanta: Black Satire after Obama collectively argue that in the years after the wides...

Reveals the development of Maurice Kenny's growing artistic consciousness, while attesting to both the beauty and brutality of the world in which he lived.Maurice Kenny's career as a writer, teacher, publisher, and storyteller spanned more than six decades, during which he published over thirty books and became one of the most prominent voices in American poetry. From the early 1970s onward, he was instrumental in the resurgence of Native American literature throug...

From 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning...

Since the publication of his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) has been considered an important new voice in American literature. His seven subsequent books have done little to contradict that initial assessment, especially after 2016’s The Underground Railroad spent many weeks at the top of bestseller lists and won numerous major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.Ranging from 2001 to 2016, the twenty-three interviews c...

Unvarnishing Reality draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek C. Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations—including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voin...

A critical analysis of Percival Everett's oeuvre through the lens of Menippean satirePercival Everett, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, is the author of more than thirty books on a wide variety of subjects and genres. Among his many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Huston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, and the Dos Passos Prize in L...

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other ad...

From reviews of the third edition:“Film Genre Reader III lives up to the high expectations set by its predecessors, providing an accessible and relatively comprehensive look at genre studies. The anthology’s consideration of the advantages and challenges of genre studies, as well as its inclusion of various film genres and methodological approaches, presents a pedagogically useful overview.” —ScopeSince 1986, Film Genre Reader has been the standar...

This is the first major collection of criticism on Black American cinema. From the pioneering work of Oscar Micheaux and Wallace Thurman to the Hollywood success of Spike Lee, Black American filmmakers have played a remarkable role in the development of the American film, both independent and mainstream.In this volume, the work of early Black filmmakers is given serious attention for the first time. Individual essays consider what a Black film tradition might be, the relation betwe...

For the first time in ebook, renowned scholar Charles Johnson’s exploration of contemporary black literature and the meaning of the black experience as expressed through the writers Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, David Bradley, and others.Charles Johnson approaches contemporary black literature through the lens of phenomenology. Drawing on such philosophers as Heidegger, Husserl, Satre, and Dufrenne, Johnson addresses the esthetic and epistemological questions surrou...

A frequent complaint against contemporary American fiction is that too often it puts off readers in ways they find difficult to fathom. Books such as Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, and Don DeLillo's Underworld seem determined to upset, disgust, or annoy their readers—or to disorient them by shunning traditional plot patterns and character development. Kathryn Hume calls such works "aggressive fiction." Why would authors risk alienating the...