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.

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Hans Bak - Uneasy Alliance, Twentieth-Century Amer ican Literature, Culture and Biography (2004).pdf

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Catherine Jurca - White Diaspora, The Suburb and t he Twentieth-Century American Novel (2001).jpg

This is the first book to analyze our suburban literary tradition. Tracing the suburb's emergence as a crucial setting and subject of the twentieth-century American novel, Catherine Jurca identifies a decidedly masculine obsession with the suburban home and a preoccupation with its alternative--the experience of spiritual and emotional dislocation that she terms "homelessness." In the process, she challenges representations of white suburbia as prostrated by its own privileges.

In novels as disparate as Tarzan (written by Tarzana, California, real-estate developer Edgar Rice Burroughs), Richard Wright's Native Son, and recent fiction by John Updike and Richard Ford, Jurca finds an emphasis on the suburb under siege, a place where the fortunate tend to see themselves as powerless. From Babbitt to Rabbit, the suburban novel casts property owners living in communities of their choosing as dispossessed people. Material advantages become artifacts of oppression, and affluence is fraudulently identified as impoverishment. The fantasy of victimization reimagines white flight as a white diaspora.

Extending innovative trends in the study of nineteenth-century American culture, Jurca's analysis suggests that self-pity has played a constitutive role in white middle-class identity in the twentieth century. It breaks new ground in literary history and cultural studies, while telling the story of one of our most revered and reviled locations: "the little suburban house at number one million and ten Volstead Avenue" that Edith Wharton warned would ruin American life and letters.

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Catherine Jurca - White Diaspora, The Suburb and t he Twentieth-Century American Novel (2001).pdf

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Deborah Clarke - Driving Women, Fiction and Automo bile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (2007).jpg

Over the years, cars have helped to define the experiences and self-perceptions of women in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. When women take the wheel, family structure and public space are reconfigured and re-gendered, creating a context for a literary tradition in which the car has served as a substitute for, an escape from, and an extension of the home, as well as a surrogate mother, a financial safeguard, and a means of self-expression.

Driving Women examines the intersection of American fiction -- primarily but not exclusively by women -- and automobile culture. Deborah Clarke argues that issues critical to twentieth-century American society -- technology, mobility, domesticity, and agency -- are repeatedly articulated through women's relationships with cars. Women writers took surprisingly intense interest in car culture and its import for modern life, as the car, replete with material and symbolic meaning, recast literal and literary female power in the automotive age.

Clarke draws on a wide range of literary works, both canonical and popular, to document women's fascination with cars from many perspectives: historical, psychological, economic, ethnic. Authors discussed include Wharton, Stein, Faulkner, O'Connor, Morrison, Erdrich, Mason, Kingsolver, Lopez, Kadohata, Smiley, Senna, Viramontes, Allison, and Silko. By investigating how cars can function as female space, reflect female identity, and reshape female agency, this engaging study opens up new angles from which to approach fiction by and about women and traces new directions in the intersection of literature, technology, and gender.

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Stephen Fredman - A Concise Companion to Twentieth -Century American Poetry (2005).jpg

Offering up-to-date coverage of 1,300 writers (100 new to this edition) and spanning from colonial days to the present, American Women Writers offers biography, criticism, bibliography and much more. Look for essays from 400 to 5,000 words assessing each writer's works; basic biographies; complete bibliographies; comprehensive data on writers' names, including pseudonyms, aliases, parents' names and husbands' names; and more.

This edition includes the best-known names: Rachel Blau DuPlessis; Sue Grafton; Donna Haraway; Lucy Lippard; Jane Smiley; Jacqueline Mitchard; Anne Waldman; etc. as well as updated or rewritten entries on outstanding writers from the fields of anthropology, religion, psychology and history: Ruth Benedict, Karen Horney, Margaret Mead, Barbara Tuchman, to name a few. This resource also includes hundreds of unjustly ignored writers who address themselves in journals, letters, stories, even hymns to their world and time.

This edition of American Women Writers is enhanced with indexes and lists that make it possible to access data by author or title. It promises concise, up-to-date critical assessments for students and teachers of American literature; enhances the interests of young or seasoned feminists; and offers good reading for browsers and popular culture fans.

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Stephen Fredman - A Concise Companion to Twentieth -Century American Poetry (2005).pdf

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Twentieth-Century American Culture - Mark Whalan - American Culture in the 1910s (2010).jpg

With the publication of this volume, Edinburgh University Press closes out its extremely successful culture history series, which writes the story of the twentieth century through the cultural and intellectual movements of each decade. The 1910s were mostly dominated by the horrors of the first modern war, but it also witnessed the flowering of modernism, the birth of Hollywood, and the rise of progressive interpretations of culture and society. Mark Whalan investigates this decade through achievements in fiction and poetry; art and photography; film and vaudeville; and music, theater, and dance. He incorporates detailed commentary and directed case studies of influential texts and events and includes chronologies and bibliographies. He considers Tarzan of the Apes, The Birth of a Nation, the radical modernism of Gertrude Stein, the Provincetown Players, and jazz music's earliest recordings. A concluding chapter explores the impact of the First World War on cultural understandings of nationalism, citizenship, and propaganda.

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James V. Catano - Ragged Dicks (2001).jpg

Examining narratives of the self-made man from Carnegie to Iacocca, with African-American, ethnic, and worker narratives included, this book shows the persuasive powers of [the story of the self-made man] in creating and re-creating masculinity. This book will help articulate the relationship of rhetoric and psychoanalysis beyond the limits of individualism to cultural questions of gender, race, and class.

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James V. Catano - Ragged Dicks (2001).pdf

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Lee Feinstein, Tod Lindberg - Means to an End, U.S . Interest in the International Criminal Court (20 09).jpg

The International Criminal Court remains a sensitive issue in American foreign policy circles. It was agreed to at the tail end of the Clinton administration, but with serious reservations. In 2002 the Bush administration ceremoniously reversed course and unsigned the Rome Statute that had established the Court. But recent developments in Washington and elsewhere indicate that the United States may be moving toward de facto acceptance of the Court and active cooperation in its mission. In Means to an End: U.S. Interest in the International Criminal Court, Lee Feinstein and Tod Lindberg reassess the relationship of the United States and the ICC, as well as American policy toward international justice more broadly. The authors argue that the United States should actively support the ICC for the simple reason that it serves U.S. interests while being consistent with the values that America publicly espouses. The authors also show how participation could be beneficial in terms of national security and foreign policy generally, and they make the moral case for acceptance as well. They evaluate the ICC s potential to advance international justice and how American participation can improve that potential.

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Lee Feinstein, Tod Lindberg - Means to an End, U.S . Interest in the International Criminal Court (20 09).pdf

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C. Richard King - The Native American Mascot Contr oversy, A Handbook (2010).jpg

Sports mascots have been a tradition for decades. Along with the usual lions and tigers, many schools are represented by Native American images. Once considered a benign practice, numerous studies have proved just the opposite: that the use of Native American mascots in educational institutions has perpetuated a shameful history of racial insensitivity. The Native American Mascot Controversy provides an overview of the issues that have been associated with this topic for the past 40 years. The book provides a comprehensive and critical account of the issues surrounding the controversy, explicating the importance of anti-Indian racism in education and how it might be challenged. A collection of important primary documents and an extensive list of resources for further study are also included. Expounding the dangers and damages associated with their continued use, The Native American Mascot Controversy is a useful guide for anyone with an interest in race relations.

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C. Richard King - The Native American Mascot Contr oversy, A Handbook (2010).pdf

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Charles V. Willie, Richard J. Reddick - A New Look at Black Families, Sixth Edition (2010).jpg

Charles Willie and Richard Reddick's A New Look at Black Families has introduced thousands of students to the intricacies of the Black family in American society. Using a case study approach, Willie and Reddick show the varieties of the Black family experience and how those experiences vary by socioeconomic status. The sixth edition has been re-organized and updated throughout. The new Part III: Cases Against and for Black Men and Women unites two chapters from previous editions into a cohesive discussion of stereotypes and misunderstandings from both scholars and the mass media. Also, a new chapter on the Obama family offers support for cross-gender and cross-racial mentoring, and it demonstrates the value of extended family relations.

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Charles V. Willie, Richard J. Reddick - A New Look at Black Families, Sixth Edition (2010).pdf

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John R. Lott Jr. - More Guns, Less Crime, Understa nding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition (2 010).jpg

On its initial publication in 1998, John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime drew both lavish praise and heated criticism. More than a decade later, it continues to play a key role in ongoing arguments over gun-control laws: despite all the attacks by gun-control advocates, no one has ever been able to refute Lott’s simple, startling conclusion that more guns mean less crime. Relying on the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever conducted on crime statistics and right-to-carry laws, the book directly challenges common perceptions about the relationship of guns, crime, and violence. For this third edition, Lott draws on an additional ten years of data—including provocative analysis of the effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C—that brings the book fully up to date and further bolsters its central contention.

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James P. Lynch, Lynn A. Addington - Understanding Crime Statistics (2006).jpg

In Understanding Crime Statistics, Lynch and Addington draw on the work of leading experts on U.S. crime statistics to provide much-needed research on appropriate use of this data. Specifically, the contributors explore the issues surrounding divergence in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which have been the two major indicators of the level and of the change in level of crime in the United States for the past 30 years. This book examines recent changes in the UCR and the NCVS and assesses the effect these have had on divergence. By focusing on divergence, the authors encourage readers to think about how these data systems filter the reality of crime. Understanding Crime Statistics builds on this discussion of divergence to explain how the two data systems can be used as they were intended - in complementary rather than competitive ways.

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James P. Lynch, Lynn A. Addington - Understanding Crime Statistics (2006).pdf

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Teun Voeten - Tunnel People (2010).jpg

First published in the Netherlands in 1996, this book chronicles Voeten’s five-month exploration of the society that exists underneath the streets of Manhattan. Voeten, an accomplished war photographer and reporter, didn’t write about the people who lived in the tunnels under New York from the point of view of an observer. He lived in the tunnels, grew to know the people who lived there, and came to understand not just how they got there but also the society they have created. Like Jennifer Toth’s Mole People (1993) and Matthew O’Brien’s Beneath the Neon (2007), Voeten’s book captivates readers with its compassionate portraits of the people and their surroundings, while exploring the surprisingly varied reasons why these men and women wound up living just beneath the surface of the reader’s world. --David Pitt

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Teun Voeten - Tunnel People (2010).pdf

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Lisa Gitelman - Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Mach ines, Representing Technology in the Edison Era (2 000).jpg

This is a richly imaginative study of machines for writing and reading at the end of the nineteenth century in America. Its aim is to explore writing and reading as culturally contingent experiences, and at the same time to broaden our view of the relationship between technology and textuality.

At the book’s heart is the proposition that technologies of inscription are materialized theories of language. Whether they failed (like Thomas Edison’s “electric pen”) or succeeded (like typewriters), inscriptive technologies of the late nineteenth century were local, often competitive embodiments of the way people experienced writing and reading. Such a perspective cuts through the determinism of recent accounts while arguing for an interdisciplinary method for considering texts and textual production.

Starting with the cacophonous promotion of shorthand alphabets in postbellum America, the author investigates the assumptions—social, psychic, semiotic—that lie behind varying inscriptive practices. The “grooves” in the book’s title are the delicate lines recorded and played by phonographs, and readers will find in these pages a surprising and complex genealogy of the phonograph, along with new readings of the history of the typewriter and of the earliest silent films. Modern categories of authorship, representation, and readerly consumption emerge here amid the un- or sub-literary interests of patent attorneys, would-be inventors, and record producers. Modern subjectivities emerge both in ongoing social constructions of literacy and in the unruly and seemingly unrelated practices of American spiritualism, “Coon” songs, and Rube Goldberg-type romanticism.

Just as digital networks and hypertext have today made us more aware of printed books as knowledge structures, the development and dissemination of the phonograph and typewriter coincided with a transformed awareness of oral and inscribed communication. It was an awareness at once influential in the development of consumer culture, literary and artistic experiences of modernity, and the disciplinary definition of the “human” sciences, such as linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Recorded sound, typescripts, silent films, and other inscriptive media are memory devices, and in today’s terms the author offers a critical theory of ROM and RAM for the century before computers.

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Lisa Gitelman - Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Mach ines, Representing Technology in the Edison Era (2 000).pdf

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Murat Kurnaz - Guantanamo, Pięć lat z mojego życia (2008).jpg

Czy w walce z terroryzmem powinno się stosować tak zwane środki specjalne? Na czym one polegają? Jaką terroryści powinni ponieść karę? Czy jest różnica między walką z terroryzmem a walką z terrorystami? Skąd pewność, że ktoś jest terrorystą? Dziewiętnastoletni Murat Kurnaz, Niemiec tureckiego pochodzenia, długo nie interesował się islamem. Pracował jako ochroniarz i uczył się budować statki. Kiedyś poczuł, że chce poznać wiarę przodków, pojechał więc do Pakistanu, by studiować Koran. Gdy wracał do kraju, został aresztowany przez Pakistańczyków i sprzedany za 3000 dolarów Amerykanom. Co przemawiało przeciw niemu? Wyznanie? Atletyczna budowa? Buty do trekkingu, uznane za wojskowe? Kurnaza przewieziono do więzienia w Guantanamo, w którym spędził pięć lat. Tysiąc osiemset dni wypełnionych upokorzeniami - takimi jak kpiny z Koranu i próby uwiedzenia przez strażniczki - oraz torturami, z których najmniej wymyślne było bicie i wieszanie za ręce. Murat Kurnaz powtarza w wywiadach, że jego relacja nie ma charakteru ideologicznego, nie zwraca się przeciw narodom, religiom czy jakimkolwiek systemom wartości. Jest opowieścią o losach człowieka skrzywdzonego w imię wyższych celów. Nie daje żadnych odpowiedzi, ale pozwala postawić wiele ważnych pytań. Kiedy książka ukazała się w Niemczech, nie zabrakło głosów krytyki, podważających to świadectwo. Podkreślano, że prawdziwości relacji nie można jednoznacznie udowodnić - Kurnaz jest pierwszą osobą, która wyszła z tamtego więzienia, a jego książka to jedyna dostępna relacja o tym, co naprawdę dzieje się w Guantanamo.
"Czy można wierzyć Muratowi Kurnazowi? Wielu mu nie wierzy. Ale spisana w tej książce relacja dwudziestoczteroletniego bremeńczyka zgadza się w najdrobniejszych szczegółach z tym, co wiemy dziś o Guantanamo z raportów i dokumentów."
Der Stern

"Kurnaz wyjechał do Pakistanu w trzy tygodnie po atakach na Nowy Jork i Waszyngton, tuż przed wojną w Afganistanie. Dlaczego podróż o charakterze, jak twierdzi, edukacyjnym zaczął tak konspiracyjnie, wychodząc w noc i mgłę bez pożegnania z rodzicami; dlaczego bilety kupił przy użyciu karty kredytowej należącej do znanego islamisty - na te pytania Kurnaz nie daje przekonującej odpowiedzi. Jego opowieść, będąca muzułmańską wersją historii świętego Pawła, staje się przez to niepełna i zastanawiająca."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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Barack Obama - Odziedziczone marzenia, Spadek po m oim ojcu (2008).jpg

Barack Obama (ur. 1961), pierwszy czarnoskóry prezydent Stanów Zjednoczonych, wybrany 4 listopada 2008 r. 44. prezydentem USA z ramienia Partii Demokratycznej.
Jest postacią nietuzinkową już choćby z racji pochodzenia - jest synem Kenijczyka i Amerykanki, córki farmera ze stanu Kansas. To pochodzenie ukształtowało jego szczególną wrażliwość i tolerancję wobec różnic rasowych, kulturowych, terytorialnych. W książce, w której opisuje swoje życie, zadaje wiele trudnych pytań - o własną tożsamość, o to, ile w nim samym zostało z marzeń jego ojca, który chciał zmieniać swoją afrykańską ojczyznę, a także o to, co trzeba zrobić, żeby pozostać wiernym sobie i swojemu systemowi wartości.

Wspomnienia napisane są obrazowym, błyskotliwym językiem, jednak w sposób daleki od egzaltacji czy sentymentalizmu. Pisząc o swoim życiu, Barack Obama nie boi się być szczery.

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Alison K. Hoagland - Army Architecture in the West (2004).jpg

During the nineteenth century, the U.S. military built numerous forts across the country as it stationed more and more troops west of the Mississippi. When most people think about military forts in the American West, they imagine imposing strongholds, meccas of defense enclosed by high, palisaded walls. This popular view, however, is far from reality.

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Alison K. Hoagland - Army Architecture in the West (2004).pdf

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Catherine M. Roach - Mother-Nature, Popular Cultur e and Environmental Ethics (2003).jpg

This brief but ambitious book explores our relationship with nature through the imagery we use when we talk about Mother Nature. Employing the critical tools of religious studies, psychology, and gender studies, Catherine M. Roach examines the various manifestations of nature as "mother" and what that idea implies for the way we approach the natural world. Part One, "Nature as Good Mother," discusses the notion that nature is, or is like, a beneficent and nurturing mother who provides and maintains life. In studying the "green" slogan "Love Your Mother," Roach questions the effects -- for women and for the environment -- of imputing female gender to nature. She asks us to look at the associations that "motherhood" and "mothering" carry within a culture still shaped by patriarchy. She notes the danger of such an apparently pro-environmental slogan if "mother" evokes the bountiful, self-sacrificing provider who herself requires no care.

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