In The Art of Memory in Exile, Hana Pí chová explores the themes of memory and exile in selected novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Both writers, Pí chová argues, stress how personal and cultural memory serves as a creative means of overcoming the artist’ s and exile’ s loss of homeland. In their virtuoso displays of literary talent, Nabokov and Kundera showcase the strategies that allow their protagonists to succeed as é migré s: a creative fusing of past and present through the prism of the imagination.
 
Pí chová closely analyzes two novels by each author: the first written in exile (Nabokov's Mary and Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and a later, pivotal novel in each writer's career (Nabokov's The Gift and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being). In all four texts, these authors explore how the kaleidoscope of personal and cultural memory confronts a fragmented and untenable present, contrasting the lives of fictional é migré s who fail to bridge the gap between past and present with those é migré s whose rich artistic vision allows them to transcend the trials of homelessness.
 
By juxtaposing these novels and their authors, Pí chová provides a unique perspective on each writer's vast appeal and success. She finds that in the work of Nabokov and Kundera, the most successful exiles express a vision that transcends both national and temporal boundaries.

The memory of the American Civil War took many forms over the decades after the conflict ended: personal, social, religious, and political. It was also remembered and commemorated by poets and fiction writers who understood that the war had bequeathed both historical and symbolic meanings to American culture. Although the defeated Confederacy became best known for producing a literature of nostalgia and an ideological defensiveness intended to protect the South's own version of history, authors loyal to the Union also confronted the question of what the memory of the war signified, and how to shape the literary response to that individual and collective experience.

In Ashes of the Mind, Martin Griffin examines the work of five Northerners—three poets and two fiction writers—who over a period of four decades tried to understand and articulate the landscape of memory in postwar America, and in particular in that part of the nation that could, with most justification, claim the victory of its beliefs and values. The book begins with an examination of the rhetorical grandeur of James Russell Lowell's Harvard Commemoration Ode, ranges across Herman Melville's ironic war poetry, Henry James's novel of North-South reconciliation, The Bostonians, and Ambrose Bierce's short stories, and ends with the bitter meditation on race and nation presented by Paul Laurence Dunbar's elegy "Robert Gould Shaw." Together these texts reveal how a group of representative Northern writers were haunted in different ways by the memory of the
conflict and its fraught legacy.

Griffin traces a concern with individual and community loss, ambivalence toward victory, and a changing politics of commemoration in the writings of Lowell, Melville, James, Bierce, and Dunbar. What links these very different authors is a Northern memory of the war that became more complex and more compromised as the century went on, often replacing a sense of justification and achievement with a perception of irony and failed promise.

In this groundbreaking work, Linda A. Westervelt defines an important yet previously unidentified and therefore unnamed type of novel, the altersroman, or age novel. Fictions focusing on a protagonist's confrontation with mortality toward the end of middle age are likely to become ever more prominent in a Western world in which the average age of the population increases and more people reach late middle age and old age.

Working from a diverse sample of modern literature, Westervelt analyzes the variety of responses to the life evaluation. Some characters achieve a level of affirmation that allows renewal, redirection, or simply peace, while others confront feelings of disgust or despair that so little time is left them. Her altersromane are books about seeking wisdom, though not everyone of this age becomes wise. The use of the term altersroman highlights the fact that the altersroman is a classification comparable to but also clearly distinguishable from the bildungsroman, wherein characters make the transition from youth to adulthood. Westervelt contrasts her older protagonists' characteristics with the equivalent characteristics in the bildungsroman through an examination of Don Quixote, part 2, as well as six American novels: The Ambassadors, by Henry James; The Professor's House, by Willa Cather; The Mansion, by William Faulkner; The Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner; A Book of Common Prayer, by Joan Didion; and Jazz, by Toni Morrison. These seven works, though remarkably different, share the common features of the altersroman. Westervelt articulates the traits clearly, rests them on the psychological literature, and then shows in depth how the characteristics of the altersroman can enrich and more deeply inform our reading of a significant subset of modern literature that previously went unheralded. Readers can use Westervelt's analysis to identify altersromane in literature other than their own, and she begins this process by identifying exemplars written in other languages.

Beyond Innocence, or the Altersroman in Modern Fiction introduces readers to the altersroman as a tool for classification and analysis and demonstrates the power and utility of that tool. It offers a meaningful and enriching complement to the more established category of the bildungsroman.

The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. California Cooper’s Family, and Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child.

Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as “liberatory narratives.” These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the “safe” vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.

From Sylvia Plath’s depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering “bits” to AIDS elegies’ assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostly form and Susan Howe’s insistence that the past can be conveyed only through juxtaposed “scraps,” the condition of being too late is one that haunts post-World War II American poetry. This is a poetry saturated with temporal delay, partial recollection of the past, and the revelation that memory itself is accessible only in obstructed and manipulated ways. These postwar poems do not merely describe the condition of lateness: they enact it literally and figuratively by distorting chronology, boundary, and syntax, by referring to events indirectly, and by binding the condition of lateness to the impossibility of verifying the past. The speakers of these poems often indicate that they are too late by repetitively chronicling distorted events, refusing closure or resolution, and forging ghosts out of what once was tangible.

Ghostly Figures contends that this poetics of belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry. Discussing works by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, and a group of poets responding to the AIDS epidemic, Ann Keniston draws on and critically assesses trauma theory and psychoanalysis, as well as earlier discussions of witness, elegy, lyric trope and figure, postmodernism, allusion, and performance, to define the ghosts that clearly dramatize poetics of belatedness throughout the diverse poetry of post–World War II America.

For James Joyce, perhaps the most crucial of all human faculties was memory. It represented both the central thread of identity and a looking glass into the past. It served as an avenue into other minds, an essential part of the process of literary composition and narration, and the connective tissue of cultural tradition. In Joyce’s Book of Memory John S. Rickard demonstrates how Joyce’s body of work—Ulysses in particular—operates as a “mnemotechnic,” a technique for preserving and remembering personal, social, and cultural pasts.
Offering a detailed reading of Joyce and his methods of writing, Rickard investigates the uses of memory in Ulysses and analyzes its role in the formation of personal identity. The importance of forgetting and repression, and the deadliness of nostalgia and habit in Joyce’s paralyzed Dublin are also revealed. Noting the power of spontaneous, involuntary recollection, Rickard locates Joyce’s mnemotechnic within its historical and philosophical contexts. As he examines how Joyce responded to competing intellectual paradigms, Rickard explores Ulysses’ connection to medieval, modern, and (what would become) postmodern worldviews, as well as its display of tensions between notions of subjective and universal memory. Finally, Joyce’s Book of Memory illustrates how Joyce distilled subjectivity, history, and cultural identity into a text that offers a panoramic view of the modern period.
This book will interest students and scholars of Joyce, as well as others engaged in the study of modern and postmodern literature.

No matter when or where they are fought, all wars have one thing in common: a relentless progression to monuments and memorials for the dead. Likewise all art made from war begins and ends in mourning and remembrance. In The Mourner's Song, James Tatum offers incisive discussions of physical and literary memorials constructed in the wake of war, from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to the writings of Stephen Crane, Edmund Wilson, Tim O'Brien, and Robert Lowell.

Tatum's touchstone throughout is the Iliad, not just one of the earliest war poems, but also one of the most powerful examples of the way poetry can be a tribute to and consolation for what is lost in war. Reading the Iliad alongside later works inspired by war, Tatum reveals how the forms and processes of art convert mourning to memorial. He examines the role of remembrance and the distance from war it requires; the significance of landscape in memorialization; the artifacts of war that fire the imagination; the intimate relationship between war and love and its effects on the ferocity with which soldiers wage battle; and finally, the idea of memorialization itself. Because all survivors suffer the losses of war, Tatum's is a story of both victims and victors, commanders and soldiers, women and men. Photographs of war memorials in Vietnam, France, and the United States beautifully augment his testimonials.

Eloquent and deeply moving, The Mourner's Song will speak to anyone interested in the literature of war and the relevance of the classics to our most pressing contemporary needs.

In The Nature of Trauma in the American Novel, Michelle Balaev undertakes an ambitious rethinking of the foundations, implementations, and new possibilities of literary trauma theory.

Fernando A. Blanco’s Neoliberal Bonds: Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature analyzes the sociocultural processes that have reshaped subjectivities in post-Pinochet Chile. By creatively exploring the intersections among memory, gender, post-trauma, sociology, psychoanalysis, and neoliberalism, Neoliberal Bonds draws on Lacan’s notion of perversion to critique the subjective fantasies that people create to compensate for the loss of the social bond in the wake of a dictatorship founded on individualism, competition, and privatization.
 
Neoliberal Bonds vehemently criticizes how Chile’s transition governments, through a series of political and legal maneuvers, created the state’s official memory narratives. Blanco argues that the state, the media, academia, and the neoliberal market colluded to colonize and mediatize the “memory scene.” In contrast to these official narratives, Neoliberal Bonds analyzes alternative memory accounts within the visual arts and literature that push back against the state, its institutions, and its economic allies. These alternative memory narratives highlight the ontological fracture of the new neoliberal subjects; they also bring into sharp relief the urgent need for democratization that still poses a challenge to Chile a quarter century after its “transition to democracy” began.

"A stunning, brilliant, absolutely compelling reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf's novels and essays. In addition to transforming our understanding of Woolf, this book radically expands our understanding of the historicity and contingent construction of psychoanalytic theory and our vision of the potential of psychoanalytic feminism."—Nancy J. Chodorow, University of California at Berkeley

"Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis brings Woolf's extraordinary craftsmanship back into view; the book combines powerful claims about sexual politics and intellectual history with the sort of meticulous, imaginative close reading that leaves us, simply, seeing much more in Woolf's words than we did before. It is the most exciting book on Woolf to come along in some time."—Lisa Ruddick, Modern Philology

In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents’ ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. 

Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic “returns”: first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives—including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others—register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory.