Miller as a writer whose work does something more profound and violent to literary conventions than produce novel effects: it announces the possibility of difference and instability within language itself. Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however, Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through that very motion. Katy Masuga provides a new reading of Miller that is alert to the aggressively and self-consciously writerly form of his work. Critiquing the categorization of Miller into specific literary genres through an examination of the small body of critical texts on his oeuvre, Masuga draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a minor literature, Blanchot's "infinite curve," and Bataille's theory of puerile language, while also considering Miller in relation to other writers, including Proust, Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. She shows how Miller defies conventional modes of writing, subverting language from within. Katy Masuga is Adjunct Professor of British and American literature, cinema, and the arts in the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Henry Miller and Modernism: The Years in Paris, 1930–1939 represents a major reevaluation of Henry Miller, focusing on the Paris texts from 1930 to 1939. Finn Jensen analyzes Miller in the light of European modernism, in particular considering the many impulses Miller received in Paris. Jensen draws on theories of urban modernity to connect Miller’s narratives of a male protagonist alone in a modern metropolis with his time in Paris where he experienced a self-discovery as a writer. The book highlights several sources of inspiration for Miller including Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Hamsun, Strindberg and the American Transcendentalists. Jensen considers the key movements of modernity and analyzes their importance for Miller, studying Eschatology, the Avant-Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Anarchism.

Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Miller was not a fashionable writer for literary studies. In fact, there exist only three collections of essays concerning Henry Miller's oeuvre. Since these books appeared, a new generation of international Miller scholars has emerged, one that is re-energizing critical readings of this important American Modernist. Henry Miller: New Perspectives presents new essays on carefully chosen themes within Miller and his intellectual heritage to form the most authoritative collection ever published on this author.

In this bold study James M. Decker argues against the commonly held opinion that Henry Miller’s narratives suffer from ‘formlessness’. He instead positions Miller as a stylistic pioneer, whose place must be assured in the American literary canon. From Moloch to Nexus through such widely-read texts as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Decker examines what Miller calls his ‘spiral form’, a radically digressive style that shifts wildly between realism and the fantastic. Drawing on a variety of narratological and critical sources, as well as Miller’s own aesthetic theories, he highlights that this fragmented narrative style formed part of a sustained critique of modern spiritual decay. A deliberate move rather than a compositional weakness, then, Miller’s style finds a wide variety of antecedents in the work of such figures as Nietzsche, Rabelais, Joyce, Bergson and Whitman, and is viewed by Decker as an attempt to chart the journey of the self through the modern city. Henry Miller and Narrative Form affords readers new insights into some of the most challenging writings of the twentieth century and provides a template for understanding the significance of an extraordinary and inventive narrative form.

Literature, Amusement and Technology examines the exchange between literature and recreational practices in 1930s America. William Solomon argues that autobiographical writers like Edward Dahlberg and Henry Miller took aesthetic inspiration from urban manifestations of the carnival spirit: Coney Island amusement parks, burlesque, vaudeville, and the dime museum display of human oddities. More broadly, he demonstrates that the literary projects of the period pivoted around images of grotesquely disfigured bodies which appeared as part of this recreational culture.

This series of bibliographical references is one of the most important tools for research in modern and contemporary French literature. No other bibliography represents the scholarly activities and publications of these fields as completely.