Issue 10 Editorial
Welcome to Issue 10 of the Irish Journal for American Studies, which covers two years of publication, 2020-’21. It has been a complex time, but nonetheless a pleasure to work with those contributors who have co... Read More...
Review: Christian Schmidt, Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction.
Schmidt, Christian. Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017 (Volume 256 of American Studies). ISBN 9783825374914. €45 (Hardback). ... Read More...
‘The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism’: Navigating American Racial Anxiety in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became
The conflict between racial equality and white anxiety is the central point of interrogation of N.K Jemisin’s 2020 novel, The City We Became, an American sci-fi novel which depicts the literal birth of New York... Read More...
Review: Wickham Clayton, ed, Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film
Wickham Clayton, editor. Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ISBN 978-1-137-49646-1. €48 (paperback). 254pp
It is only fitting, in a collection of this type, that Carol Cl... Read More...
“‘Normal People’ Indeed!”: Anne Tyler, Sally Rooney, and the Narrative of Youthful Quirk
With the critical and popular success of her two millennial novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), Irish author Sally Rooney has been compared to an impressive handful of literary ... Read More...
Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner
It would be easy to argue that any critical discourse concerning the metaphor of “shame” in the South has to be interpreted in terms of race. As recent scholarly work has asserted, “Shame is used in America to ... Read More...
Satire, Symbolism, and the “Working Through” of Historical Ghosts in The Confidence-Man
Although there have been powerful attacks on what Hershel Parker nominates as the “standard line of interpretation” (x) regarding Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, what could we gain from going against the ... Read More...
Review: Leopold Lippert, Performing America Abroad
Leopold Lippert, Performing America Abroad: Transnational Cultural Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018.
Leopold Lippert’s Performing America Abroad provides a survey... Read More...
“The Product of a Spoiled America”: Divorce as Collective Crisis in U.S. Popular Culture of the 1990s
The new millennium has entered its third decade, but the 1990s have never quite left us. For twenty years, they have been haunting the pop-cultural imagination as a lost golden era. In what is just the latest i... Read More...
Review: Kloeckner, Knewitz, and Sielke, eds., Knowledge Landscapes North America
Kloeckner, Christian, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke, editors. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016.
Data explosions and information revolutions have made news on both sides... Read More...
Review: T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America
T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019.
That revolutions generally end very badly is a truth generally (i... Read More...
The Populist Turn in American Politics: A Review-Essay of Kivisto’s The Trump Phenomenon
Peter Kivisto. The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016. Emerald Publishing, 2017.
It is a truism of recent political discourse that the United States has become a more polarized nation... Read More...
Review: Andy Connolly, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition
Andy Connolly. Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Lexington Books, 2017.
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in November 2016 has proved a happy event for fiction. Thi... Read More...
Review: Ernst, Matter-Siebel, and Schmidt, eds., Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism
Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Siebel, and Klaus H. Schmidt, editors. Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018.
Using “revisionist” in the title of a text is som... Read More...
Review: Bernice M. Murphy, Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction
Bernice M. Murphy. Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Students and academics always need keywords and concise definitions for the everyday concepts they refer to,... Read More...