Power Plays in Transnational American Fiction : Gender, Race, and Genre

Inspired by the career of Judie Newman, a genuinely ground-breaking scholar in the fields of U.S. and postcolonial literature, this book moves beyond strict national or genre boundaries in its approach to American literature and cultural production.

Power Plays in Transnational American Fiction derives its breadth and focus from an international range of contributors who examine the significant ways in which U.S. cultural texts travel across various contested borders. Reading a rich range of 19th-century, 20th-century, and contemporary American literature and film, contributors explore questions of genre, race, gender, production, circulation, and legacy.

With original essays by leading scholars from the U.K., Ireland, Israel, and the U.S.A., this book achieves an ambitious historical and intellectual sweep through new research on the rise of American print technologies and early space travel novels in the 19th century to re-readings of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, the Black American detective novel, and the work of Saul Bellow and John Updike.

And with a further focus on the afterlife of Shirley Jackson’s writing and key fictions of America by contemporary U.S., Canadian and British writers and filmmakers – Ted Chiang, Denis Villeneuve, Bharati Mukherjee, and Maggie O’Farrell – Power Plays in Transnational American Fiction breaks new ground across a host of fields from literary studies and the history of the book to adaptation theory and postcolonial studies.