Maria Loeschnigg, The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change. CAT 7 (Trier: WVT, 2014), 381 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 In spite of pessimistic forecasts regarding the future development of the Canadian short story by the Literary History of Canada in 1965,[1] the genre has flourished in the intervening decades since the…
Read MoreJochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann. Eds. Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing (New York: Routledge, 2015), 282 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 The concept of liminality is rather expansive, a fact that many of the contributors to Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann’s collection tend to convey. Predicated in…
Read MoreRobert Paul Lamb, The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 233 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 The professional study of literature places demands on scholars that are not required of casual readers, who are free to read as quickly or inventively as they…
Read MoreFrank Gado, ed., William Cullen Bryant: The Complete Stories (Hartford, Vt.: Antoka Press: 2014) 327pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 In many respects, Bryant has become a shadowy figure in the American literary canon. Students in academic classes may encounter “Thanatopsis,” but few others from Bryant’s verse output. They are even less likely to find specimens…
Read MorePaul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015), 241 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 As the digital media affect ever greater portions of everyday life, scholarly interest in their impact on cultural production has increased as well. Poetry is not usually associated with technological…
Read MoreSimone Knewitz, Modernist Authenticities: The Material Body and the Poetics of Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 249 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Within the larger context of modernism, the complex relationship between the material body and poetic expression is one of two analytical foci of Simone Knewitz’s study. In order to…
Read MoreANDREW S. GROSS, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015) Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 This book on the reactions to Ezra Pound’s Bollingen Award has itself won a prize, the Rob Kroes Publication Award by the European Association of American Studies. Since one of the effects of reading…
Read MoreSascha Pöhlmann, Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century, European Studies in North American Literature and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), 424 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Sascha Pöhlmann’s study of American poetry belongs to a currently growing body of scholarly works partaking in a ‘temporal turn’ in literary and…
Read MoreMark Noble, American Poetic Materialism: From Whitman to Stevens, New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2015. 242 pp. Paul Mariani, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2016. 496 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Wallace Stevens’s poetry has frequently been regarded as philosophical[1] and used to support claims…
Read MoreMarcus Münch, Building New Faith on New-Found Shores: Die religiöse Dimension in der Dichtung der Fireside Poets (Trier: WVT, 2016), 239 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Marcus Münch’s study of the “religious dimension” in the poetical works of William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes takes as its theoretical…
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