Shaped by the experiences of the Iranian Revolution, Iranian-American autobiographers use this chaotic past to tell their current stories in the United States. Wagenknecht analyzes a wide range of such writing and draws new conclusions about migration, exile, and life between different and often clashing cultures.

This literary companion guides the reader into the labyrinth of storytelling within The Arabian Nights.The Arabian Nights has become a synonym for the fabulous and the exotic. Every child is familiar with the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. Yet very few people, even specialists in oriental literature, have a clear idea of when the book was written or what exactly it is.Far from being a batch of stories for children,

Mark Twain, who was often photographed with a cigar, once remarked that he came into the world looking for a light. In this new biography, published on the centennial of the writer’s death, Jerome Loving focuses on Mark Twain, humorist and quipster, and sheds new light on the wit, pathos, and tragedy of the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In brisk and compelling fashion, Loving follows Twain from Hannibal to Hawaii to the Holy Land, showing how the southerner transformed...

On March 19, 2013, a distinguished group of writers and critics gathered at the Newark Museum’s Billy Johnson Auditorium in Newark, New Jersey, to celebrate the extraordinary career and lasting literary legacy of Philip Roth on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This keepsake volume gathers remarks from the evening’s speakers, a fitting tribute to the only living novelist whose work is collected in the Library of America series. Here you’ll find Jonathan Lethem, hilariously recounting his ...

Perspectives on America's greatest living playwright that explore his longstanding commitment to forging a uniquely American theaterArthur Miller's America collects new writing by leading international critics and scholars that considers the dramatic world of icon, activist, and playwright Arthur Miller's theater as it reflects the changing moral equations of his time. Written on the occasion of Miller's 85th year, the original essays and interviews in Arthur Miller's ...

Catharine Maria Sedgwick was an American novelist of what is sometimes referred to as "domestic fiction". She promoted Republican motherhood. Miss Sedgwick’s first publication was “The New England Tale.” In 1836, she commenced writing in quite a new vein, giving a series of illustrations of common life, called “The Poor Rich Man, and the Rich Poor Man.” These were followed, in 1837, by “Live and Let Live,” and afterwards by “Means and Ends,” a “Love Token for Children,” and “Stories for Yo...

Arabic Literature for the Classroom argues for a more visible presence of Arabic within the humanities and social sciences, stressing the need to make Arabic literature available as a world literature, without damaging its own distinctive characteristics.The nineteen chapters which make up this book broach theoretical and methodical cultural concerns in teaching literatures from non-American cultures, along with issues of cross-cultural communication, cultural competency a...

This collection of essays explores some new possibilities for understanding postcolonial traumas. It examines representations of both personal and collective traumas around the globe from Palestinian, Caribbean, African American, South African, Maltese, Algerian, Indian, Australian and British writers, directors and artists.

This book comprehensively surveys Philip Roth's published and unpublished works, focusing on the thematic unity which binds them together: the memory of the Holocaust and the altered universe born of that memory. The Holocaust is understood as the orienting event for Roth's fiction and non-fiction, the force that surrounds the characters and the narratives at all times. Roth's obsession with questions of the Holocaust, questions of responsibility, meaning, and powerlessness, explains his r...

When Henry Luce announced in 1941 that we were living in the "American century," he believed that the international popularity of American culture made the world favorable to U.S. interests. Now, in the digital twenty-first century, the American century has been superseded, as American movies, music, and video games are received, understood, and transformed.How do we make sense of this shift? Building on a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, Brian T. Edwards maps ...

Phillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatley uses John Milton's poetry to develop an idealistic vision of an emerging Anglo-American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, Native Americans, and women.

Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses ceased to be family owned, instead becoming sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Sentimental literature—work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling—does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Surprisingly, though, sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture of managed systems threatened to obs...