Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed literary choice and not of cultural brainwashing or declining literary standards.

Grotesque features have been among the chief characteristics of drama in English since the 1990s. This new book examines the varieties of the grotesque in the work of some of the most original playwrights of the last three decades (including Enda Walsh, Philip Ridley, Tim Crouch and Suzan-Lori Parks), focusing in particular on ethical and political issues that arise from the use of the grotesque.

This book draws on the tools of literary analysis and cultural geography to investigate Ernest Hemingway's sophisticated construction of physical environments. In doing so, Laura Gruber Godfrey revises conventional approaches to Hemingway’s literary landscapes and provides insight about his fictional characters and his readers alike.

This book argues that narrative literature very often, if not always, include significant amounts of what appears to be extra-literary material – in form and in content – and that we too often ignore this dimension of literature.

Foreign Accents sets forth a historical poetics of verse by writers of Chinese descent in the U.S. from the early twentieth century to the present. With readings of works by Ezra Pound, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Ha Jin, and John Yau, this study charts the dimensions of Asian American verse as an evolving and contested counterpoetic formation.