Category: Subgenres

EMILY PETERMANN, The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction, (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 250 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1     The descriptive structuralist semiotic analyses presented in this book evolved from discussions at the Word and Music Association Forum (WMAF; viii). The WMAF was formed in 2009…

HABIBA IBRAHIM, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2012), 256pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies. 63.1     In his anthology Interracialism (2000), Werner Sollors diagnosed an “American exceptionalism” in the policing of racialized boundaries, a “300-year-long tradition” in which sexual and familial relations across the…

HANNA WIRTH-NESHER, ed., The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (New York: Cambridge UP, 2016), 732 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1     This much-needed volume brings Jewish American literature as an ethnic literature back on the critical agenda. That the very concept should have almost vanished from the landscape of critical debates is noteworthy…

MARK STOREY, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 208 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1     Mark Storey’s study, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities, aims to read markers of modernity as “absent presences” (2) in a number of novels set in rural environments of the Gilded Age.…

PHILIPP LÖFFLER, Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War (Rochester: Camden House, 2015), 190 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1     Philipp Löffler’s Pluralist Desires seeks to rethink historical fiction after the end of the Cold War. As Löffler argues, the novels he discusses share a belief that “when we…

SYBILLE MACHAT, In the Ruins of Civilization: Narrative Structures, World Constructions and Physical Realities in the Post-Apocalyptic Novel (Trier: WVT, 2013), 330 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies. 63.1     Contemporary culture is awash with images and narratives anticipating its own demise or, as the case may be, documenting its on-going decay. Scenarios depicting the aftermath of…

SONJA SCHILLINGS, Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence, Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies (Hanover: Dartmouth College P/UP of New England, 2016), 302 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 63.1     Can acts of violence ever be legitimate, and how have claims of legitimate violence been theorized and represented in legal theory…