North American Literature

Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane

Mark Asquith, Independent Scholar, UK Lost in the New West investigates a group of writers who have sought to explore the tensions inherent to the Western, where distinctions between old and new, myth and reality, authenticity and sentimentality are often blurred. Mark Asquith draws attention to the idealistic young men at the center of such works as John Williams's Butcher's Crossing (1960), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories and Thomas McGuane's Deadrock novels. For each writer, these characters struggle to come to terms with the difference between the suspect mythology of the American West that shapes their identity and the reality that surrounds them.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 256 pages HB 9781501349522 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501349539 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501349546 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing

Edited by S. E. Gontarski, Florida State University, USA In the 1960s and 1970s, Burroughs collaborated with filmmakers and musicians, who recontextualized his writings in other media. Burroughs Unbound examines these collaborations and explores how such multiple authorship complicates the authority of the archive as a final or complete repository of an author’s work. It takes Burroughs seriously as a radical theorist and practitioner who challenges common assumptions about language, authorship, and the archive in its broadest definition.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 304 pages HB 9781501362187 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501362194 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501362200 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic

David Foster Wallace and Religion

Essays on Faith and Fiction

Edited by Michael McGowan, Florida Southwestern State College, USA & Martin Brick, Ohio Dominican University, USA At present, the scholarly community is sharply divided on how best to read Wallace on religious questions. The multifarious essays in this volume by literature, religion, and philosophy scholars in the Wallace community delve into Wallace’s life and writings to advance the conversation about Wallace and religion. While they may disagree with one another in substantial ways, the contributors argue that Wallace was not only deliberate in his writings on religious themes, but also displayed an impressive level of theological nuance.

UK May 2021 • US May 2021 • 224 pages PB 9781501381485 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501345289 ePub 9781501345296 • £27.60 / $35.95 ePdf 9781501345302 • £27.60 / $35.95 Bloomsbury Academic

Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War

Michael Zeitlin, University of British Columbia, Canada This volume frames William Faulkner's airplane narratives against major scenes of the early 20th century: the Great War, the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the Second World War and the aviation arms race extending from the Wright Flyer into the Cold War era. Placing biographical accounts of Faulkner's time in the Royal Air Force Canada against analysis of such works as Soldiers' Pay (1926), "All the Dead Pilots" (1921), Pylon (1935) and A Fable (1954), the author outlines Faulkner's complex and ambivalent relations to the ideologies of masculine performance and martial heroism in an age dominated by industrialism and military technology.

UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 256 pages • 10 bw illus HB 9781501356759 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501356766 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501356773 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic

Wallace’s Dialects

Mary Shapiro, Truman State University, USA Wallace’s Dialects straddles the fields of linguistic criticism and folk linguistics, considering which linguistic variables of Jewish-American English, African-American English, Midwestern, Southern, and Boston regional dialects were salient enough for Wallace to represent, and how he showed the intersectionality of these with gender and social class. The author’s own use of language is examined with respect to how it encodes his identity as a white, male, economically privileged Midwesterner, while also foregrounding characteristic and distinctive idiolect features that allowed him to connect to readers across implied social boundaries.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 240 pages PB 9781501371134 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501348471 ePub 9781501348488 • £76.69 / $99.00 ePdf 9781501348495 • £76.69 / $99.00 Series: David Foster Wallace Studies • Bloomsbury Academic

Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities

Computational Approaches to Style

Erik Ketzan Providing an in-depth analysis of Pynchon’s style using methodologies from the digital humanities, including computational analysis, this book reveals new stylistic trends in Pynchon’s oeuvre. It challenges critical assumptions regarding supposedly “Pynchonesque” stylistic features and presents the most extensive description thus far of Pynchon’s “late style”. Examining a range of texts including Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon, this book also contextualises his work alongside the works of Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Stephen King.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 256 pages HB 9781350211834 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350211858 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350211841 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: New Horizons in Contemporary Writing • Bloomsbury Academic