Reviews

Leeds, Marc. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia. Revised and updated ed., Delacorte, 2016. The novels, plays and short stories of Kurt Vonnegut can be said to constitute a complex, interconnected fictive universe. Ch... Read More...

Gersdorf, Catrin, and Juliane Braun, eds. America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. American Studies 270. What is the State of the Union, what the state of US-Amer... Read More...

Teaford, Jon C. The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise and Reality. 3rd ed. John Hopkins UP, 2016. The title of the third edition of Jon C. Teaford’s study of the American metropolis, The 20th... Read More...

Burt, Stephen. the poem is you: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2016. 432 pages. ISBN 9780674737877. Buy here. Over the course of any given year, I recei... Read More...

Mac Donnell, Kevin, and R. Kent Rasmussen, eds. Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings. Bloomsbury, 2016. The recent emergence of Mark Twain’s discussion-style autobiography has helped to pre... Read More...

Ellerhoff, Steve Gronert. Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. Routledge, 2016. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff’s incisive exploration of the short fiction of Kurt Vonnegu... Read More...

Matterson, Stephen. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity. Bloomsbury, 2014. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity is an exploration of Melville’s representations of selfhood, identity and self-fashioning in moderni... Read More...

Clarke, Edward. The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens Edward Clarke’s The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens offers a refreshing and risky reading of these poets’ last poems... Read More...

Downey, Dara. American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Critics of American gothic fiction often have noted something exceptional about U.S. horror.  A common position holds... Read More...

Jenkins, Lee M. The American Lawrence. University Press of Florida, 2015. Lee M. Jenkins’s The American Lawrence is an arresting book. The title is printed in a stylised font that invokes the ‘Wanted’ poster... Read More...

Review: Kevin J. Hayes, A Journey Through American Literature, Kevin J. Hayes (Oxford: OUP, 2012) Clare Hayes-Brady University College Dublin A blurb on the back cover of Kevin J. Hayes’s A Journey Through A... Read More...

Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960.  (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.) Gavan Lennon University... Read More...

Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) Hanna Bingel Queen’s University, Belfast In recent years there has been a... Read More...

“[…] the many genres of grief underscore the magnitude of the challenge of making death meaningful, as the unique and individual nature of loss runs up against the dominant conventions that shape memorial traditions and practices” (4).

Review: Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López (eds), Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López’s Irreverent Apparition Donna Maria Alexander University College Cork In 2001, Alma López’s digital collage, Our Lady a... Read More...

Review: Edward Ragg, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) $135 262 pp Alex Runchman Trinity College Dublin The question of abstraction in Wallace St... Read More...

Review: Arthur Drooker, American Ruins (New York and London: Merrell, 2007)

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Samuel Fisher Dodson, Berryman’s Henry

Stephanie Rains, The Irish-American in Popular Culture

Stephen Mennell, The American Civilizing Process

Lee Marshall, Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star