This project approaches four of E. L. Doctorow’s novels—Welcome to Hard Times (1960), The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), and City of God (2000)—from the perspectives of feminist criticism and trauma theory. The study springs from the assumption that Doctorow’s literary project is eminently ethical and has an underlying social and political scope. This crops up through the novels’ overriding concern with injustice and their engagement with the representation of human suffering in a variety of forms. The book puts forward the claim that E.L. Doctorow’s literary project—through its representation of psychological trauma and its attitude towards gender—may be understood as a call to action against both each individual’s indifference and the wider social and political structures and ideologies that justify and/or facilitate the injustices and oppression to which those who are situated at the margins of contemporary US society are subjected.

Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So re-examines the prevailing critical consensus that Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist writer. While more difficult elements of his work have often been the subject of scholarly attention, the tendency amongst critics writing on Vonnegut is to disavow them, or to subsume them within a liberal humanist framework. When Vonnegut’s work is read from a posthumanist perspective, however, the productive paradoxes of his work are more fully realised. Drawing on New Materialist, Eco-Critical and Systems Theory methodologies, this book highlights posthumanist themes in six of Vonnegut’s most famous novels, and emphasises the ways in which Vonnegut troubles human/non-human, natural/artificial, and material/discursive hierarchical binaries

In Defense of Dialogue: Reading Habermas and Postwar American Literature offers a timely investigation of the value of dialogue in contemporary American culture. Using Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action to read the work of Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, and Andy Warhol, In Defense of Dialogue assembles postwar writers who have never been studied alongside one another, showing how they overcame the pervading skepticism of their contemporaries to imagine sincere and rational speakers who seek to cultivate intersubjective discourse.

"The Melting Pot," "The Land of The Free," "The Land of Opportunity." These tropes or nicknames apparently reflect the freedom and open-armed welcome that the United States of America offers. However, the chronicles of history do not complement that image. These historical happenings have not often been brought into the focus of Modernist literary criticism, though their existence in the record is clear. This book aims to discuss these chronicles, displaying in great detail the underpinnings and subtle references of racism and xenophobia embedded so deeply in both fictional and real personas, whether they are characters, writers, legislators, or the common people. In the main chapters, literary works are dissected so as to underline the intolerance hidden behind words of righteousness and blind trust, as if such is the norm. Though history is taught, it is not so thoroughly examined. To our misfortune, we naively think that bigoted ideas are not a thing we could become afflicted with. They are antiques from the past – yet they possessed many hundreds of people and they surround us still. Since we’ve experienced very little change, it seems discipline is necessary to truly attempt to be rid of these ideas.

Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and re-comprehends it as both a formal tragedy— a generic translation of fiction and tragedy or a “novel-tragedy” (Kliger)—and a novel of objects. Its many things—literary, conceptual, linguistic— are viewed as vessels carrying the (hi)story and the political concerns. From this, a third conclusion is drawn: Fadem argues for a view of Beloved as a case for reparations. That status is founded on two outstanding object lessons: the character of Beloved as embodiment of the subject-object relations defining the slave state and the grammatical object “weather” in the sentence “The rest is...” on the novel’s final page. This intertextual reference places Beloved in a comparative link with Hamlet and Oresteia. Fadem’s research is meticulous in engaging the full spectrum of tragedy theory, much critical theory, and a full swathe of scholarship on the novel. Few critics take up the matter of reparations, still fewer the politics of genre, craft, and form. This scholar posits Morrison’s tragedy as constituting a searing critique of modernity, as composed through meaningful intertextualities and as crafted by profound “thingly” objects (Brown). Altogether, Fadem has divined a fascinating singular treatment of Beloved exploring the connections between form and craft together with critical historical and political implications. The book argues, finally, that this novel’s first concern is justice, and its chief aim to serve as a clarion call for material— and not merely symbolic—reparations. This book is freely available to read at https://taylorandfrancis.com/socialjustice/?c=language-literature-arts#

Spectres from the Past: The "History" of Slavery in West African and African-American Narratives examines the merit of the claim that West African writers, in comparison to African-Americans authors, deliberately expunge the history of slavery from literary narratives. The book explores slavery in contemporary West African and African-American literature by looking at the politics of history and memory. It interrogates notions of History and memory by considering the possibility that shared traumas, such as West African and African-American experiences of slavery, can be remembered and historicised differently, according to critical factors such as socio-economic realities, cultural beliefs and familial traditions. At the heart of the book are compelling and new readings of slavery in six literary narratives that draws on cultural philosophies, musicology and linguistics to demonstrate diverse and unusual ways that Black writers in West Africa and North America write about slavery in literature.

Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel suggests that literature after September 11, 2001 reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of personal and collective trauma, this book argues for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. These novels embrace not only American writers such as Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Thomas Pynchon, and Amy Waldman but also the countervailing perspectives of global novelists such as J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, and Laila Halaby. These are not novels about terror(ism), nor do they seek comfort in the respectful cloak of national mourning. Rather, they are instances of the novel in terror, which recognizes that everything having been changed after 9/11, only the formally inventive presentation will suffice to acknowledge the event’s unpresentability and its shock to the political order.