This book examines novels of Faulkner and Morrison as well as Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison in order to show that their works forcefully undermine the racial and sexual divisions characterizing both the South and contemporary culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, the book discusses theories of reader-response and reception study and elaborates a theory of reception study based on the historical or "archeological" methods of Michel Foucault. As a consequence, unlike most studies of American literature, which discuss its historical contexts or prescribe its readers’ responses, this book explains the reception of these works, including the academic criticism and reviews and, because the internet exerts immense influence in the twenty-first century, the on-line responses of ordinary readers. Unlike most reception studies, this book examines the institutional contexts of the readers’ responses.
Author(s): Philip Goldstein
Series: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 212
City: London
Contents
Introduction
1 Aesthetic Theory: From Adorno to Cultural History
2 Reading in History and in Theory
3 Mark Twain’s Detective Fiction: From The Stolen White Elephant and The Double-Barrelled Detective Story to The Adventures of Pudd’nHead Wilson
4 Faulkner’s Subversive Modernism: Light in August
5 Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: Modernism and Democracy in American Literature
6 Three Days Before the Shooting: Modernism and Democracy in/and American Literature
7 Toni Morrison’s Beloved: The Forgotten History of Slavery and Patriarchy
8 Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: The Critique of Patriarchy and History’s Lost Opportunities
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
