Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth-century American Literature, Culture and Biography

Front Cover
Hans Bak
Rodopi, 2004 - History - 367 pages
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.
 

Contents

Preface
9
Peter Rietbergen
31
Gonny van Beekvan Overbeek
59
Edward Margolies 101 10
101
Richard S Kennedy
143
Susan Castillo
173
Marian Janssen
199
Jaap van der Bent
215
Jan Bakker
243
Ashley
269
Hans Bak
285
Mary A McCay
305
Loes Nas
323
Hans Bertens
345
Notes on Contributors
363
Copyright

René Verwaaijen
229

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Page 16 - I don't agree with you. I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't express me; and heaven forbid they should!
Page 16 - There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things.
Page 15 - I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There 's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self?
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