Labor's Text charts how the worker has been portrayed and often misrepresented in American fiction. Laura Hapke offers hundreds of depictions of wage earners: from fiction on the early artisan "aristocrats" to the Gilded Age's union-busting novelists to the year 2000's marginalized, apolitical men and women. Whether the authors discussed are pro- or anti-labor, Hapke illuminates the literary, historical, and intellectual contexts in which their fiction was produced and read.

Xbox videogamer cholo cyberpunks. Infants who read before they talk. Vatos locos, romancing abuelos, border crossers and border smugglers, drug kingpins, Latina motorbike riders, philosophically musing tweens, and so much more.

The stories in this dynamic bilingual prose-art collection touch on the universals of romance, family, migration and expulsion, and everyday life in all its zany configurations. Each glimpse into lives at every stage—from newborns and children to teens, young adults, and the elderly—further submerges readers in psychological ups and downs. In a world filled with racism, police brutality, poverty, and tensions between haves and have-nots, these flashes of fictional insight bring gleaming clarity to life lived where all sorts of borders meet and shift.

Frederick Luis Aldama and graphic artists from Mapache Studios give shape to ugly truths in the most honest way, creating new perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about life in the borderlands of the Américas. Each bilingual prose-art fictional snapshot offers an unsentimentally complex glimpse into what it means to exist at the margins of society today. These unflinching and often brutal fictions crisscross spiritual, emotional, and physical borders as they give voice to all those whom society chooses not to see.

“Doyle demonstrates that Alcott kept up a running dialogue with her distinguished British counterpart, both contesting and adapting Brontë’s treatments of woment’s spiritual, social, and vocational lives so as to develop her own distinctively American talent.” —Elizabeth Keyser, author of Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott

“Doyle provides an illuminating discussion of the full range of Louise May Alcott’s writing. Comparisons with Charlotte Brontë spark keen insights into literary traditions and cultural events. General readers will enjoy this book; Alcott and Brontë scholars will need it.” —Beverly Lyon Clark, author of Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys

The work and life of British author Charlotte Brontë fascinated America’s Louisa May Alcott throughout her own literary career. As a nineteenth-century writer struggling with many of the same themes and issues as Brontë, Alcott was drawn toward her British counterpart, but cultural differences created a literary distance between them sometimes as wide as the Atlantic.

In this comparative study, Christine Doyle explores some of the intriguing parallels and differences between the two writers’ backgrounds as she traces specific references to Brontë and her work—not only in Alcott’s children’s fiction, but also in her novels for adults and “sensation fiction.” Doyle compares the treatment of three themes important to both writers—spirituality, interpersonal relations, and women’s work—showing how Alcott translated Brontë’s British reserve and gender- and class-based repression into her own American optimism and progressivism.

In her early career, Alcott was so fascinated by Brontë’s works that she patterned many of her characters on those of Brontë; she later adapted these British elements into a more recognizably American form, producing independent, strong heroines. In observing differences between the writers, Doyle notes that Alcott expresses less anti-Catholic sentiment than does Brontë. She also discusses the authors’ attitudes toward the theater, showing how for Brontë drama is associated with falseness and hypocrisy, while for Alcott it is a profession that expresses possibilities of power and revelation.

Throughout her insightful analysis, Doyle shows that Alcott responds as a uniquely American writer to the problems of American literature and life while never denying the powerful transatlantic influence exerted by Brontë. Doyle’s work reflects a wide range of scholarship, solidly grounded in an understanding of the Victorian temperament, nineteenth-century British and American literature, and recent Alcott criticism and gives fuller voice to the multiple dimensions of Alcott as a nineteenth-century writer.

The Author: Christine Doyle is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University.

Lyrical Strategies advances the highly original idea that not all literary fiction should be read as a novel. Instead, Katie Owens-Murphy identifies a prominent type of American novel well suited to the reading methods of lyric poetry and exhibiting lyric frameworks of structural repetition, rhythm, figurative meaning, dramatic personae, and exclusive address.
 
Owens-Murphy surveys a broad array of writers: poets from the lyrical transatlantic tradition, as well as American novelists including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy. Through a masterful reexamination of canonical works of twentieth-century American fiction through the lens of lyric poetry, she reveals how many elements in these novels can be better understood as poetic and rhetorical figures (metaphysical conceit, polysyndeton, dramatic monologue, apostrophe, and so on) than as narrative ones.
 
Making fresh contributions to literary theory and American fiction, Lyrical Strategies will fascinate readers and scholars of the American novel, fiction, poetry, and poetics alike.