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This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became “car accidents” and “industrial accidents.” During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own “mutual society.” This book reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance.

Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.

How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. The book moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, it considers alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.

This book draws from theories of the grotesque to examine many of the strange and extraordinary creatures and phenomena in the premodern Japanese tales called setsuwa. Grotesque representations in general typically direct our attention to unfinished and unrefined things; they are marked by an earthy sense of the body and an interest in the physical, and, because they have many meanings, can both sustain and undermine authority. The book aims to make sense of grotesque representations in setsuwa—animated detached body parts, unusual sexual encounters, demons and shape-shifting or otherwise wondrous animals—and, in a broader sense, to show what this type of critical focus can reveal about the mentality of Japanese people in the ancient, classical, and early medieval periods. It places Japanese tales of this nature, which have received little critical attention in English, within a sophisticated theoretical framework, focusing on them in the context of the historical periods in which they were created and compiled.

American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.

Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy, models that, in the last two decades, have been the focus of critiques of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. While such critiques have proven useful, they often draw attention to the conceptual or material tensions of romantic subjectivity while accepting a conspicuous, autonomous subject as a given, thus failing to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona. This book goes against the grain of these dominant critical stances by examining anonymity as a model of being that is provocative for writers of the era because it resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency and self-disclosure. The author explores how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, frequently rejects the demands of self-assertion and fails to prove its authenticity and coherence.

Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others “barbarians.” Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. The book recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.

Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. This book traces the development of that image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's “coming of age” in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, the book establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. Because the city is an aggregation of knowledge, the book draws from sociology, urban studies, sociolinguistics, history, psychoanalysis, and literary history to produce a complex account of Barcelona's self-reflection through culture. The last chapter offers a glimpse into the “post-historical” city, where temporality has been sacrificed to the spatialization associated with the seductions of the spectacle.

This book is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife—the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film—it reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art. As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a “censored” commodity—thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of England's literary censorship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood's infamous Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship, the author explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.

In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the female genital mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across Africa's “excision belt” have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from “the cult of culture” and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. They have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, this book interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision's “fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification.

This book offers a rereading of the well-known Japanese writer Abe Kōbō, focusing on his essays as well as his fiction. Central attention is devoted to the concepts of time, writing, and community. For Abe, following Heidegger, the question of ontology was to be understood on the basis of time. Time, conceived ecstatically as that which is always outside of itself, demands that all temporal entities in the world be understood as bereft of any proper or original identity. In this account, identity can only be attributed retroactively in a movement that helps reveal the disjointed nature of time. The notion of writing appears as intrinsically linked to time, for time only gives itself through an inscription that remains from the past and carries on into the present and future. The relation between time and writing necessarily affects the manner in which community is formed, for no community can simply be grounded on a preexisting identity. Directly to the contrary, the creation of such collective identity must be made in all contingency. The book provides readings of such canonical Abe texts as Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes] and Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] while also analyzing lesser- known works such as the essay “Uchinaru henkyō” [The Frontier Within] and the interview collection (with Donald Keene) entitled Hangekiteki ningen [The Anti-Theater Person].

This book exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake. The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. The book takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times.

This book explores the construction and emergence of “Bohemia” in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. This study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. This book fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. It not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon, but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. The author brings together an unusual group of primary sources to investigate how nineteenth-century Britons looked at and represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped British writers' and artists' vision of their own lives and experiences. For many Britons, China was much more than a geographical location; it was also a way of seeing and being seen that could be either embraced as creative inspiration or rejected as contagious influence. In both cases, the idea of its visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real. To better grasp what Romantic and Victorian writers, artists, and architects were doing at home, we must also understand the foreign “objects” found in their midst and what they were looking at abroad.

This book contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and have viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of the Romantics' late work as evidence of declining abilities. The author of this book argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model which adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.

This book traces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. It reveals how novels mediate legal reforms, and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of “the real.” The chapter examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, the author critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. She examines the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of legal reform, documenting how texts were understood both at first publication and as their importance changed over time.

As China's centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of “late socialism,” public concern about economic reform's downside has found expression in epic novels about official corruption and its effects. While the media shied away from dealing with these issues, novelists stepped in to fill the void. “Anti-corruption fiction” exploded onto the marketplace and into public consciousness, spawning popular films and television series until a clampdown after 2002 that ended China's first substantial realist fiction since the 1989 Beijing massacre. With frankness and imagination seldom allowed journalists, novelists have depicted the death of China's rust-belt industries, the gap between rich and poor, “social unrest”—i.e., riots—and the questionable new practices of entrenched communist party rulers. This book examines this rebirth of the Chinese political novel and its media adaptations, explaining how the works reflect contemporary Chinese life and how they embody Chinese traditions of social criticism, literary realism, and contemplation of taboo subjects. It investigates such novels and includes excerpts from personal interviews with China's three most famous anti-corruption novelists.

This is a comparative and interdisciplinary study exploring the unexpected yet essential relationship between irony and capital in the texts of Baudelaire and Marx. It argues for the renewed relevance of their work to contemporary thinking about the place of aesthetic and cultural experience in social and political life, and articulates their poetic and philosophical innovations with their political statements. Through readings of Baudelaire's poetry and prose and Marx's Capital, this book illuminates their ongoing contribution to our understanding of themes and topics at the forefront of contemporary theoretical debate, including the effects of new technologies on the means of human action and transformation, and the prospects for community and memory under capitalism. It also revisits Walter Benjamin's interpretations of the philosopher and the poet. Rereading Baudelaire and Marx together with the unplumbed lessons of Benjamin's interpretations, the book contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the political dimensions and effects of language, and to the current rethinking, in Marxist and post-Marxist theory, of conceptions of political time and agency.

Dead Pledges is a study of our contemporary culture of debt. Examining novels, poems, artworks, photographs, and films produced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, this book aims to show how US cultural texts have grappled with the rise and fall of the financialized consumer credit economy. It argues that debt is such a ubiquitous yet elusive social form that we can most clearly understand it by looking at how our culture has sought to represent it. Whether popular entertainment or avant-garde art, post-crisis cultural texts allow us to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. Across this range of sites, this book offers an account of the theoretical and political consequences of debt: how it affects our ideas of personhood and morality; how it deploys a language of irrational behavior and risky excess; how it transforms our relationship to property and possession. Bringing together economic history, debt theory, and cultural analysis, Dead Pledges demonstrates how our understanding of the economy can be illuminated by culture. What is at stake in our contemporary culture of debt is not just our measures of economic credibility but also the limits of our imaginative credulity; not just our account of economic character but also our literary characters; not just the money we see but also the way we see money; not just how we pay but also how we imagine getting payback.