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Gavin Jones is professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom. "Jones persuasively argues that the time has come for literary theory to address the issue of poverty . . . in US literature. Rather than focusing on the cultural identities of the underprivileged, the author calls for a 'theory of poverty' that will highlight and address the political and social injustices associated with the economically disadvantaged. . . . Jones posits that the work of Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard White most accurately portrays and foregrounds poverty. . . . His readings show how these writers succeeded in 'opening up the complexities and contradictions' of poverty, which contemporary literary theory fails to do. In short, Jones calls for a synthesis between discussion of race/gender/class and discussion of poverty, which often shapes identities within race, gender, and class categories."---B. M. McNeal, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, for, CHOICE "Gavin Jones's American Hungers tackles a one-hundred-year period, treating a vast range of texts with great theoretical sophistication. This ambitious book aims to make poverty as powerful an analytical tool as race and gender have proven in recent critical history."---Michael Robertson, American Literature "Jones's readings are detailed and richly informed, and his discussions of the social-scientific background--the shift from moral to biological to psychological explanations of poverty--provide a valuable history, one that should interest critics regardless of their stance toward identity politics." "The main and considerable strength of Jones's book is its theoretical contribution, which is located in the introduction. The body of the volume also makes intriguing, if not always completely persuasive, arguments."---Michael Tavel Clarke, American Quarterly "Gavin Jones's American Hungers is a major contribution to the critical debate about literary constructions of poverty in America across epochs; or rather, the book redefines the terms for this debate in such a way that establishes poverty as a valid subject of discussion in its own right, no longer a mere addition to class, race or gender criticism. Even though Jones writes only about five major texts of American literature, the scope of his presentation is impressive, wit

Ruth Leys is director of the Humanities Center and Henry Wiesenfeld Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Her books include Trauma: A Genealogy. Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the "survivor syndrome." Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms. "Ruth Leys's new book is a brilliant interdisciplinary investigation of a striking cultural transformation. From Guilt to Shame is original, with a compelling subject treated in a way that places it on the cutting edge of recent science and cultural studies."-Toril Moi, Duke University "From Guilt to Shame is original and incisive, and Leys's exposition of her provocative thesis is thoroughly persuasive. The superb chapter on Giorgio Agamben is the perfect conclusion to this excellent work, which should attract interest from readers of trauma theory, the history of traumatic stress, comparative literature, moral philosophy, and Holocaust studies."-Allan Young, McGill University

Oren Izenberg is a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago. "Because I am not silent," George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? In Being Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim. "A blazingly astute assessment of postmodern poetics, Oren Izenberg's Being Numerous examines the role contemporary poetry plays in representing being and what constitutes value of being."---Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail "[Izenberg] makes an intriguing case for focusing on the ontological dimension of poetic practice in general; readers might move beyond seeing the poem as a self-contained artifact and instead see it as a function of the poet's desire to define the person." "Izenberg's conclusive meditation on known and unknown readers, then, seems to open and invite the readings that this book will generate, as it powerfully, scrupulously recalls us to the responsibilities inherent in any literary response."---Siobhan Phillips, Contemporary Literature "Controversial and important, Being Numerous resurveys the poetic landscape and offers an alternative way of considering both it and our involvement in it. For Izenberg, poetry might well be considered 'something that we are.' And despite the philosophical richness of his arguments, he writes with a lucidity so attentive that his style can seem a kind of tenderness. This is a significant, revisionary book. It might also be a guide. Its claims on our attention will be more than momental."-Forrest Gander, Brown University "Being Numerous provides a general theory of poetry's claim to universalism through lyric transactions between a writer and a reader that are both enabled and tortured by poetic form. As a result, Izenberg pays very close attention to the reader's experience of feeling connected to the scene of being one of many through the poem. I love reading this manifestic and meticulous writing, and it has a lot to offer scholars of affect, emotion, and intimacy."-Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago "In this major book, Oren Izenberg introduces a crucial and generative new distinction that reorganizes twentieth-century poetry. Izenberg is simply the best young critic of modernist poetry around-for his capacious scholarship, his elegant prose, his imaginative scope, his close and intelligent reading, and especially his ability to show how some quite diverse poetic projects share a basic purpose."-Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley

Sean McCann is professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the rise of presidential authority. Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work. A Pinnacle of Feeling illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American culture. "McCann identifies how ambitions for the executive branch of the US government informed the 20th-century novel. . . . Few presidents appear as literary protagonists in their own right. Instead, their position serves as an ethical benchmark--whether as an authoritarian father figure, a career goal or even the target of an assassination attempt. If this symbolic use of public office threatens to rework the presidency as a chimerical, ghostly presence in the American novel, McCann carefully rebuilds these vague impressions to illustrate how authors reimagined the issue of popular sovereignty. His key argument gains momentum by describing how the ongoing debates over the boundaries of presidential government found close literary parallels. The arguments in political science monographs and middlebrow, social forecasting non-fiction are shown as the logical counterpart to imaginative representations of government institutions."---Graham Barnfield, Times Higher Education "[T]his book stands as an inventive, somewhat original brand of literary criticism."---B. Wallenstein, Choice "It is a tribute to McCann's superb book--one of the best I have read in the past five years--that his sharp description of the Republican project is a mere side-light, not central to his concerns or his thesis. McCann's scholarship, his knowledge of American history and the debates throughout that history about presidential power, his powers of exact description, and his probing analysis of the fundamental tensions in American democracy combine to make [other's] perfectly honorable books look rather pedestrian."---John McGowan, American Literary History "This is one of the most significant books on the twentieth-century American novel published in recent memory. Exemplifying how literary criticism can illuminate the relationship of politics to literature, A Pinnacle of Feeling examines an impressive array of novels to tell a compelling story of the mutual transformation of the U.S. presidency and the concept of literary authorship over the course of the century."-Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago "Sean McCann offers incisive ideological and aesthetic analyses of the ways that these authors wrestled with and within narrative forms and paradigms of literary production they understood in terms of the U.S. presidency. His articulation of the link between narrative and executive power is engaging and imaginative. There is no question that this will be an influential book."-Patricia E. Chu, University at Albany, State University of N

"Winner of the 2007 Book Prize, British Association for American Studies" Richard Godden is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution and Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer. In William Faulkner, Richard Godden traces how the novelist's late fiction echoes the economic and racial traumas of the South's delayed modernization in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal rapidly accelerated the long-term shift from tenant farming to modern agriculture, many African Americans were driven from the land and forced to migrate north. At the same time, white landowners exchanged dependency on black labor for dependency on northern capital. Combining powerful close readings of The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable with an examination of southern economic history from the 1930s to the 1950s, Godden shows how the novels' literary complexities--from their narrative structures down to their smallest verbal emphases--reflect and refract the period's economic complexities. By demonstrating the interrelation of literary forms and economic systems, the book describes, in effect, the poetics of an economy. Original in the way it brings together close reading and historical context, William Faulkner offers innovative interpretations of late Faulkner and makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the relation between literature and history. "William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words is an important contribution to Faulkner studies."---Barbara Ladd, Studies in American Fiction "For readers who enjoyed and admired the first volume, this one offers vintage Godden and potentially paradigm-shifting criticism. . . . It is in the close readings that the energies of this book lie and where the reader will find the most satisfaction and the furtherance of Faulkner scholarship."---Taylor Hagood, Journal of American Studies "Richard Godden's William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words is a stunning account of Faulkner's late fiction that combines intense close reading and attention to the history of mid-twentieth-century modernization to reaffirm Faulkner's centrality, not just to Southern literature or to modernist aesthetics, but to the mainstream of American history and culture."-Andrew Hoberek, University of Missouri, Columbia "This book asks us to think again about Faulkner and the relation of language to history. It is provocative but patiently argued, theoretically sophisticated yet marvelously fluent, challenging as well as convincing. It swims against much of the current critical tide but it gets much further into new territory on Faulkner and narrative."-Richard Gray, author of The Life of William Faulkner

"Shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Textual Study of Religion" Amy Hungerford is professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture. "Postmodern Belief offers keen insights for the serious reader regarding current writers and their conception of the sacred."---Cliff Prewencki, Salem Press Magill Book Reviews "Hungerford's text is for scholars of contemporary literature and contemporary religion; for readers concerned about the relevance of literary texts and their continued ability to inform our lives; and for readers pursuing the meaning of religious belief in a postmodern world. Her work is richly researched and interdisciplinary, moving deftly between religious history and literary theory. Her reframing of belief is both creative and capacious, reaffirming the ability of literature to convey meaning in an allegedly postliterary age."---Kristina K. Groover, Modern Philology "This is an intelligent, compelling, and beautifully-written book about the place of belief in contemporary American literature and culture. The eclectic mix of authors is gratifying, and each one is exhaustively researched."-Christopher Douglas, University of Victoria "Hungerford bravely takes on one of the great unanswered questions of contemporary literary criticism: what are we to do with the sacred? Her readings of literary texts are persuasive and powerful, and she pursues her case with subtlety, tenacity and elegance. This strong book is contrarian to its core-I really know nothing like it out there."-Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan