Deborah L. Madsen Livres

Focusing on the intricate connections between literary texts and feminist theories, this exploration delves into key concepts such as rhetoric, work, consciousness, nature, class, and race. Each chapter analyzes how these ideas shape the reception of works as 'women's writing' in American literature. Through canonical authors like Gilman, Chopin, Cather, Walker, and Beattie, it engages with significant feminist debates, offering an accessible overview of diverse feminist thought while expanding upon earlier scholarship in the field.

The Visual Culture of Modernism offers a wide-ranging exploration of intertextual relations that bring together artists, artistic forms and artistic periods in response to the question: what is the relevance of early twentieth-century American Modernism to our present historical moment? Scholars from Europe and America develop responses to this question based on the philosophical heritage of modernity and in the context of the range of Modernist cultural praxis. The essays collected here explore links between literary and cultural Modernism, the relationship between the concepts of modernity and Modernism, and the legacy of Modernism in the late twentieth century and the contemporary period. Cinema, cinematic paratexts, television, the visual arts of painting and photography, poetry, fiction, and drama are among the artistic forms discussed in terms of issues ranging from cinematic and stage reinterpretations of Modernist literary texts to the genre of televisual melodrama and the trope of racial passing. The essays argue that visuality remains an urgent concern, from the Modernist period to our present age of media revolution.

This volume brings together a selection of papers read at the2006 Geneva Conference on »American Aesthetics.« Contributors address the question of how, from our contemporary perspective, the heavily-theorized historical category of the aesthetic can be used. The investment of American writers and thinkers in the concept of the aesthetic, from the eigh-teenth century to the present, is discussed from a diversity of positions ranging from the colonial American novel, through the work of such canonical writers as Emerson and Thoreau, to contemporary »minority« ethnic and feminist texts. Indeed, the notion of »minor« literatures is interrogated here. In these essays Contributors ask how the recent critical move away from the canon, from American Literature to American literatures, shapes our understanding of aesthetic issues. While the focus is on American cultural Production, the primary intellectual contexts of the book are provided by the rise of Enlightenment aesthetic theory and the so-called »crisis of representation« that is Modernity.