[PDF] Uncanny American Fiction eBook

Author : RenŽe L. Bergland
Publisher : Dartmouth College Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 46,20 MB
Release : 2015-05-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 161168871X

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Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. RenŽe L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.

Author : Paulina Palmer
Publisher : University of Wales Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 43,82 MB
Release : 2012-01-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0708324606

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This volume investigates the roles played by the concept of the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud and other theorists, in the representation of lesbian and male gay sexualities and transgender in a selection of contemporary British, American and Caribbean fiction published 1980-2007.

Author : Susan Lepselter
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 38,51 MB
Release : 2016-03-03
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 0472052942

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An interdisciplinary study of how conspiracy theories and stories persist and resonate among different Americans

Author : Marjorie Sandor
Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin
Page : 574 pages
File Size : 26,40 MB
Release : 2015-02-24
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 146683868X

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From the deeply unsettling to the possibly supernatural, these thirty-one border-crossing stories from around the world explore the uncanny in literature, and delve into our increasingly unstable sense of self, home, and planet. The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows opens with "The Sand-man," E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1817 tale of doppelgangers and automatons—a tale that inspired generations of writers and thinkers to come. Stories by 19th and 20th century masters of the uncanny—including Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Shirley Jackson—form a foundation for sixteen award-winning contemporary authors, established and new, whose work blurs the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown. These writers come from Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Scotland, England, Sweden, the United States, Uruguay, and Zambia—although their birthplaces are not always the terrains they plumb in their stories, nor do they confine themselves to their own eras. Contemporary authors include: Chris Adrian, Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Jonathon Carroll, John Herdman, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Yoko Ogawa, Dean Paschal, Karen Russell, Namwali Serpell, Steve Stern and Karen Tidbeck.

Author : Suzanne Manizza Roszak
Publisher : Gothic Literary Studies
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 26,51 MB
Release : 2022
Category : Children in literature
ISBN : 9781786838667

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A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic. Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

Author : Petra Eckhard
Publisher : transcript Verlag
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 43,25 MB
Release : 2014-03-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3839418410

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Using the theoretical frameworks of Freud, Todorov, and Bahktin, this book explores how American writers of the late 20th century have translated the psychoanalytical concept of »the uncanny« into their novelistic discourses. The two texts under scrutiny - Paul Auster's »City of Glass« and Toni Morrison's »Jazz« - show that the uncanny has developed into a crucial trope to delineate personal and collective fears that are often grounded on the postmodern disruption of spatio-temporal continuities and coherences.

Author : Eugene Lim
Publisher : FSG Originals
Page : 124 pages
File Size : 25,94 MB
Release : 2017-06-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374716412

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One of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Favorite Fiction Books of 2017, a Literary Hub Staff Favorite Book of 2017, and one of BOMB Magazine's "Looking Back on 2017: Literature" Selections. "Wondrous . . . [A] sense of the erratic and tangential quality of everyday life—even if it’s displaced into a bizarre, parallel world—drifts off the page, into the world you see, after reading Dear Cyborgs." —Hua Hsu, The New Yorker In a small Midwestern town, two Asian American boys bond over their outcast status and a mutual love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternative or perhaps future universe, a team of superheroes ponder modern society during their time off. Between black-ops missions and rescuing hostages, they swap stories of artistic malaise and muse on the seemingly inescapable grip of market economics. Gleefully toying with the conventions of the novel, Dear Cyborgs weaves together the story of a friendship’s dissolution with a provocative and timely meditation on protest. Through a series of linked monologues, a lively cast of characters explores narratives of resistance—protest art, eco-terrorists, Occupy squatters, pyromaniacal militants—and the extent to which any of these can truly withstand and influence the cold demands of contemporary capitalism. All the while, a mysterious cybernetic book of clairvoyance beckons, and trusted allies start to disappear. Entwining comic-book villains with cultural critiques, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a fleet-footed literary exploration of power, friendship, and creativity. Ambitious and knowing, it combines detective pulps, subversive philosophy, and Hollywood chase scenes, unfolding like the composites and revelations of a dream.

Author : Peter Straub
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 15,38 MB
Release : 2009-10-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 159853047X

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From early on, American literature has teemed with tales of horror, of hauntings, of terrifying obsessions and gruesome incursions, of the uncanny ways in which ordinary reality can be breached and subverted by the unknown and the irrational. As this pathbreaking two-volume anthology demonstrates, it is a tradition with many unexpected detours and hidden chambers, and one that continues to evolve, finding new forms and new themes as it explores the bad dreams that lurk around the edges—if not in the unacknowledged heart—of the everyday. Peter Straub, one of today’s masters of horror and fantasy, offers an authoritative and diverse gathering of stories calculated to unsettle and delight. This first volume surveys a century and a half of American fantastic storytelling, revealing in its forty-four stories an array of recurring themes: trance states, sleepwalking, mesmerism, obsession, possession, madness, exotic curses, evil atmospheres. In the tales of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, the bright prospects of the New World face an uneasy reckoning with the forces of darkness. In the ghost-haunted Victorian and Edwardian eras, writers including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ambrose Bierce explore ever more refined varieties of spectral invasion and disintegrating selfhood. In the twentieth century, with the arrival of the era of the pulps, the fantastic took on more monstrous and horrific forms at the hands of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and other classic contributors to Weird Tales. Here are works by acknowledged masters such as Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Conrad Aiken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with surprising discoveries like Ralph Adams Cram’s “The Dead Valley,” Emma Francis Dawson’s “An Itinerant House,” and Julian Hawthorne’s “Absolute Evil.” American Fantastic Tales offers an unforgettable ride through strange and visionary realms. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Author : Jennifer Colville
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 16,91 MB
Release : 2017-02-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0253024366

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The ordinary and the extraordinary merge in the strange and complex lives of young women in this “frequently luminous” debut short story collection (Kirkus Reviews). Unsettling and perceptive, this debut story collection challenges our notion of American girlhood in all its delusions, conflicting messages, and treacherous terrain. Alternately wide-eyed, wise, and mysterious, the girls at the center of these stories leave their realities behind for curious new places where the barrier between real and unreal begins to blur. Still others hover over their Midwestern homes in interior worlds of their own creation. The stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls take place at a boundary where both the girls’ bodies and their narratives belong either to themselves or to the cultures that surround them. A young woman whose body continually shrinks and expands moves to Los Angeles to make a movie about tragic merpeople; bewildered and seeking guidance, a new mom strikes up a conversation with a woman with detachable hands; and spurred on by a new ally who might just be a figment of her imagination, a girl decides she can choose her own friends. “Brisk, satisfying, and fiercely observant.” —Publishers Weekly