This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the American short story, focusing on recent developments influenced by new media. It includes overviews of historical contexts and theories, as well as 35 paired readings of significant stories, tracing the genre's evolution from the 19th century to the digital age, and its reflection of American culture.
This study seeks to fill a major gap in the fields of Nineteenth-Century American and British Studies by examining how nineteenth-century intellectuals shaped and re-shaped aesthetic traditions across the Atlantic Ocean. Special attention is paid to a group of salient cultural concepts, such as artist-as-hero, imagination, the picturesque, reform, simultaneity, and seriality. Although embedded in a particular aesthetic tradition, these concepts travel from one culture to another and are transformed along their transatlantic journeys. The purpose of this book is to explore the roles of these ‘traveling concepts’ within the realm of transatlantic cultures and to trace their at times surprising paths within ever-widening transnational intellectual networks.
The study develops a new theoretical approach to the relationship between two media (jazz music and writing) and demonstrates its explanatory power with the help of a rich sampling of jazz poems. Currently, the mimetic approach to intermediality (e. g., the notion that jazz poetry imitates jazz music) still dominates the field of criticism. This book challenges that interpretive approach. It demonstrates that a mimetic view of jazz poetry hinders readers from perceiving the metaphoric ways poets rendered music in writing. Drawing on and extending recent cognitive metaphor theories (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier), it promotes a conceptual metaphor model that allows readers to discover the innovative ways poets translate “melody,” “dynamics,” “tempo,” “mood,” and other musical elements into literal and figurative expressions that invite readers to imagine the music in their mind’s eye (i. e., their mind’s ear).
The self-contained concepts of postmodern theories, often used in literary criticism, can lead to distorted interpretations when applied to dialect texts. To avoid these predetermined outcomes, Redling’s study examines specific characteristics of dialect writing, focusing on selected stories by African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt. It explores their potential translation into postmodern theory using George Steiner’s idea of “understanding as translation.” This involves confronting textual passages with theoretical terms, which are then tested against Chesnutt’s dialect stories. The approach to “understanding” utilizes the linguistic distinction between denotation and connotation. In the denotative process, critics translate elements from Chesnutt’s dialect texts into postmodern “systems of signification,” revealing both similarities and deviations among the six selected theories (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Bakhtin, Iser, and Jameson). The connotative translation process demonstrates how denotatively limited postmodern concepts can enhance a theory’s explanatory power, enriching the imaginative experience of a text. However, this approach also uncovers significant limitations in applying postmodern theories. Redling concludes that literary analysis must extend beyond postmodernism to develop a more comprehensive aesthetic that addresses the complexities of dialect texts.