Meandering plots, dead ends, and repetition, diaries do not conform to literary expectations, yet they still manage to engage the reader, arouse empathy and elicit emotional responses that many may be more inclined to associate with works of fiction. Blurring the lines between literary genres, diary writing can be considered a quasi-literary genre that offers a unique insight into the lives of those we may have otherwise never discovered. This edited volume examines how diarists, poets, writers, musicians, and celebrities use their diary to reflect on multiculturalism and intercultural relations. Within this book, multiculturalism is defined as the sociocultural experiences of underrepresented groups who fall outside the mainstream of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and language. Multiculturalism reflects different cultures and racial groups with equal rights and opportunities, equal attention and representation without assimilation. In America, the multicultural society includes various cultural and ethnic groups that do not necessarily have engaging interaction with each other whereas, importantly, intercultural is a community of cultures who learn from each other, and have respect and understand different cultures. Presented as a collection of academic essays and creative writing, The Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America analyses diary writing in its many forms from oral diaries and memoirs to letters and travel writing. Divided into three sections: Diaries of the American Civil War, Diaries of Trips and Letters of Diaspora, and Diaries of Family, Prison Lyrics, and a Memoir, the contributors bring a range of expertise to this quasi-literary genre including comparative and transatlantic literature, composition and rhetoric, history and women and gender studies.

The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic or global studies, multiethnic studies, immigration studies, and gender studies, this volume presents a multi-faceted conversation around a wide variety of subjects in U.S. southern literary studies. The Companion will offer a comprehensive overview of the southern literary studies field, including a chronological history from the U.S. colonial era to the present day and theoretical touchstones, while also introducing new methods of reconceiving region and the U.S. South as inherently interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional. The volume will therefore be an invaluable tool for instructors, scholars, students, and members of the general public who are interested in exploring the field further but will also suggest new methods of engaging with regional studies, American studies, American literary studies, and cultural studies.

Essays on the Awareness of Loss in Contemporary Albanian Literature: Voices that Come fom the Abyss is the first scholarly monograph on the concept of loss in Albanian poetry and life writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It represents the first academic contribution to an international audience dedicated to three women writers that personified loss in communist Albania and two eminent poets who wrote representative and outstanding poetry on the meaning of loss in Albanian literature. Through the work of these three politically persecuted women writers and two modern poets, this book analyzes loss in relation to pain, grief, memory, death, freedom, and love inquiring on the meeting point between life writing and poetry, and the point where they part ways. The book explores the work of: Musine Kokalari, the first Albanian woman writer and political dissident; Bedi Pipa, the first woman known to have authored a diary in Albanian literature; Drita Çomo, author of a diary and poetry written in secret in political exile under communism; Fatos Arapi the Albanian poet who has been awarded the most important international literary prize to date and who has elaborated on the ethical implications of freedom, grief and death in relation to (personal) loss; Ali Podrimja a cornerstone of contemporary Albanian poetry, author of a volume that marked a definite turn to modernity in Albanian poetry in the Republic of Kosova and to date one of the best volumes of poetry written in the history of Albanian literature Lum Lumi, where he explores the depth of grief, pain, loss and love. The works of these five authors bring forth the necessity to re-visit the history of Albanian literature and promote interdisciplinary and comparative studies beyond Albanian literature. Shatro studies the unique traits of their life writing, the specific link between different literary genres and the exceptional capacity of poetry to carry loss to the point of articulating the unsaid, thus giving a voice to silence. She argues that through diary, memoir, epistolary and poetry, all five authors provide different views of loss and its challenging ethical implications in relation to death, memory, and freedom.

What is an “American” identity? The tension between populism and pluralism, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, has marked the United States since its inception. In The Divided States, leading scholars and critics argue that the US is, and has always been, a site where multiple national identities intersect in productive and challenging ways. Scrutinizing conflicting nationalisms and national identities, the authors ask, Whose stories get told and whose do not? Who or what promotes the idea of a unified national identity in the United States? How is the notion of a unified national identity disrupted? What myths and stories bind the US together? How representative are these stories? What are the counternarratives? And, if the idea of national homogeneity is a fallacy, what does tie us together as a nation? Working across auto/biography studies, American studies, and human geography—all of which deal with the current interest in competing narratives, “alternative facts,” and accountability—the essays engage in and contribute to critical conversations in classrooms, scholarship, and the public sphere. The authors draw from a variety of fields, including anthropology; class analysis; critical race theory; diasporic, refugee, and immigration studies; disability studies; gender studies; graphic and comix studies; Indigenous studies; linguistics; literary studies; sociology; and visual culture. And the genres under scrutiny include diary, epistolary communication, digital narratives, graphic narratives, literary narratives, medical narratives, memoir, oral history, and testimony. This fresh and theoretically engaged volume will be relevant to anyone interested in the multiplicity of voices that make up the US national narrative.

The stories of lived experience offer powerful representations of a nation’s complex and often fractured identity. Personal narratives have taken many forms in American literature. From the letters and journals of the famous and the lesser known to the memoirs of former slaves to hit true crime podcasts to lyric essays to the curated archives we keep on social media, life writing has been a tool of both the influential and the disenfranchised to spark cultural and political evolution, to help define the larger identity of the nation, and to claim a sense of belonging within it. Taken together, individual stories of real American lives weave a tapestry of history, humanity, and art while raising questions about the veracity of memory and the slippery nature of truth. This volume surveys the forms of life writing that have contributed to the richness of American literature and shaped American discourse. It examines life writing as a rhetorical tool for social change and explores how technological advancement has allowed ordinary Americans to chronicle and share their lives with others.

"This book explores the career and legacy of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960), whose figural sculptures embody her uncompromising sovereignty over her work and life. Through original essays, catalogue entries on Prophet's major works, and an illustrated chronology of her remarkable life, this book demonstrates how Prophet continues to inspire a new generation of artists and viewers today. Contributors trace her transatlantic career, from Parisian ateliers to Spelman College, and consider topics such as the art institutions Prophet navigated, the stylistic connections between her figurative sculpture and the work of her modernist contemporaries, and how she resisted predetermined conceptions of her cultural identity."--

Glass slippers, a fairy godmother, a ball, a prince, an evil stepfamily, and a poor girl known for sitting amongst the ashes: incarnations of the "Cinderella" fairy tale have resonated throughout the ages. Hidden between the lines of this fairy tale exists a history of fantasy about agency, power, and empowerment. This book examines twenty-first-century “Cinderella” adaptations that envision the classic tale in the twenty-first century through the lens of wokenesss by shifting rhetorical implications and self-reflexively granting different possibilities for protagonists. The contributors argue that the "Cinderella" archetype expands past traditional takes on the passive princess. From Sex and the City to Game of Thrones, from cyborg "Cinderellas" to Inglorious Basterds, contributors explore gender-bending and feminist adaptations, explorations of race and the body, and post-human and post-truth rewritings. The collection posits that contemporary “Cinderella” adaptations create a substantive cultural product that both inform and reflect a contemporary social zeitgeist.