The first scholarly study of the rich body of poetry that emerged from the post-war American suburbs, Gill evaluates the work of forty poets, including Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, and John Updike. Combining textual analysis and archival research, this book offers a new perspective on the field of twentieth-century American literature.

The first scholarly study of the rich body of poetry that emerged from the post-war American suburbs, Gill evaluates the work of forty poets, including Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, and John Updike. Combining textual analysis and archival research, this book offers a new perspective on the field of twentieth-century American literature.

While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes literary and art studies, philosophy, and cultural comment. It examines the suburbs across cultural differences, contrasting British, South African and North American suburbs. The specificity of this book therefore lies in a cross-national and cross-continental exploration of these unchartered territories. The suburbs are redefined as those rebellious margins whose geographical borders are necessarily fuzzy and sketch out a common place where cultural frontiers can be transcended. They are, to use Sarah Nuttall’s terminology, places of “entanglement” where contraries meet and where new ways of being in the world is reborn. Seen through the prism of art and literature, the suburbs may then be recognized, as philosopher Bruce Bégout argues, as a “new way of thinking and making urban space.”

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as Americans contended with rapid industrial and technological change, readers relied on periodicals and books for information about their changing world. Within this print culture, a host of writers, editors, architects, and reformers urged men to commute to and from their jobs in the city, which was commonly associated with overcrowding, disease, and expense. Through a range of materials, from pattern books to novels and a variety of periodicals, men were told of the restorative effects on body and soul of the natural environment, found in the emerging suburbs outside cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. They were assured that the promise of an ideal home, despite its association with women's work, could help to motivate them to engage in the labor and commute that took them away from it each day. In Suburban Plots, Maura D'Amore explores how Henry David Thoreau, Henry Ward Beecher, Donald Grant Mitchell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and others utilized the pen to plot opportunities for a new sort of male agency grounded, literarily and spatially, in a suburbanized domestic landscape. D'Amore uncovers surprising narratives that do not fit easily into standard critical accounts of midcentury home life. Taking men out of work spaces and locating them in the domestic sphere, these writers were involved in a complex process of portraying men struggling to fulfill fantasies outside of their professional lives, in newly emerging communities. These representations established the groundwork for popular conceptions of suburban domestic life that remain today.

This book looks again at the filmic and televised spaces we think we know so well. How are these spaces built up? What is it that makes us recognize them as suburbs? How do they function? Vermeulen usesDesperate Housewives, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Happiness, Pleasantville, Brick and Chumscrubber to explore these questions.

Explores how American writers articulate the complexity of twentieth-century suburbiaExamines the ways American writers from the 1960s to the present - including John Updike, Richard Ford, Gloria Naylor, Jeffrey Eugenides, D. J. Waldie, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Daz and John Barth - have sought to articulate the complexity of the US suburbsAnalyses the relationships between literary form and the spatial and temporal dimensions of the environment Scrutinises increasingly prominent literary and cultural forms including novel sequences, memoir, drama, graphic novels and short story cyclesCombines insights drawn from recent historiography of the US suburbs and cultural geography with analyses of over twenty-five texts to provide a fresh outlook on the literary history of American suburbiaThe Literature of Suburban Change examines the diverse body of cultural material produced since 1960 responding to the defining habitat of twentieth-century USA: the suburbs. Martin Dines analyses how writers have innovated across a range of forms and genres - including novel sequences, memoirs, plays, comics and short story cycles - in order to make sense of the complexity of suburbia. Drawing on insights from recent historiography and cultural geography, Dines offers a new perspective on the literary history of the US suburbs. He argues that by giving time back to these apparently timeless places, writers help reactivate the suburbs, presenting them not as fixed, finished and familiar but rather as living, multifaceted environments that are still in production and under exploration.

Conformity and Resistance in America, a collection of thirty six essays from various fields of the U.S. studies, addresses the American culture as a space of fruitful tensions between the generally acknowledged canons and the projects that have questioned and subverted its very foundations and archives. The book seeks to give justice to those areas of American culture that traditionally used to be treated as marginal and negligible but which in fact have added up to its uniqueness. This includes various areas of American cultural and literary studies, gender and minority studies, themes of diasporic communities, multi-ethnic and multicultural society, problems of global economy and of competing worldwide ideologies. The papers included in this book try to answer pressing questions of the American identity in the post-9/11 world, and do so by pointing to the recent â oehumanities crisisâ as well as revealing moments of heterogeneity and discontinuity in the making of any culture. Contrary to Samuel Huntingtonâ (TM)s dictum telling us of the inevitable â oeclash of civilizations, â the following essays concentrate on what Edward W. Said called â oehumanismâ (TM)s sphereâ â " the sphere of antagonizing discourses and narratives which challenge rather than confirm the bases of their legitimacy. Wavering between conformity and resistance, the essays propose possible formulas for the new American identity as it strives to define and project itself into the new century.