Trinummus is another fabula palliata by Plautus. Enriched by the art of the Latin author, the result was too tedious and very elitist, compared to what usually characterized the Plautine comic. Through stock characters of fixed social types (e.g. the old, the Young, the slaves), several cultural themes are analyzed, such as friendship, morality, loyalty, money. Thus, the senex Charmides, whose …
In As Long as We Both Shall Love, Karen M. Dunak provides a nuanced history of the American wedding and its celebrants. Blending an analysis of film, fiction, advertising, and prescriptive literature with personal views from letters, diaries, essays, and oral histories, Dunak demonstrates the ways in which the modern wedding epitomizes a diverse and consumerist culture and aims to reveal an ong…
Offers a critical history of the role of pain, suffering, and compassion in democratic culture.American Dolorologies presents a theoretically sophisticated intervention into contemporary equations of subjectivity with trauma. Simon Strick argues against a universalism of pain and instead foregrounds the intimate relations of bodily affect with racial and gender politics. In concise and original…
The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by lea…
Cool. The concept has distinctly American qualities and it permeates almost every aspect of contemporary American culture. From Kool cigarettes and the Peanuts cartoon's Joe Cool to West Side Story (Keep cool, boy.) and urban slang (Be cool. Chill out.), the idea of cool, in its many manifestations, has seized a central place in our vocabulary. Where did this preoccupation with cool come from? …
This collection of essays offers evolutionary psychological analysis of selected works from the American literary tradition. Application of evolutionary theory to writing by Ben Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Zora Neal Hurston, and others creates an interdisciplinary framework for examining key textual features-plot, theme, tone, sett…
This collection of essays offers evolutionary psychological analysis of selected works from the American literary tradition. Application of evolutionary theory to writing by Ben Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Zora Neal Hurston, and others creates an interdisciplinary framework for examining key textual features-plot, theme, tone, sett…
Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in li…
Michael P. Carroll argues that the academic study of religion in the United States continues to be shaped by a "Protestant imagination" that has warped our perception of the American religious experience and its written history and analysis.In this provocative study, Carroll explores a number of historiographical puzzles that emerge from the American Catholic story as it has been understood thr…