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8113 books match the query 'Literary Criticism' and 16 start with y

cover of Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity

Yaqui Indigeneity

Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity

Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga

University of Arizona Press, 2018

The Yaqui warrior is a persistent trope of the Mexican nation. But using fresh eyes to examine Yoeme indigeneity constructs, appropriations, and efforts at reclamation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican and Chicana/o literature provides important and vivid new opportunities for understanding. In Yaqui Indigeneity, Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga offers an interdisciplinary approach to examining representations of the transborder Yaqui nation as interpreted through the Mexican and Chicana/o imaginary.

Tumbaga examines colonial documents and nineteenth-century political literature that produce a Yaqui warrior mystique and reexamines the Mexican Revolution through indigenous culture. He delves into literary depictions of Yaqui battalions by writers like Martín Luis Guzmán and Carlos Fuentes and concludes that they conceal Yaqui politics and stigmatize Yaqui warriorhood, as well as misrepresent frequently performed deer dances as isolated exotic events.

Yaqui Indigeneity draws attention to a community of Chicana/o writers of Yaqui descent: Chicano-Yaqui authors such as Luis Valdez, Alma Luz Villanueva, Miguel Méndez, Alfredo Véa Jr., and Michael Nava, who possess a diaspora-based indigenous identity. Their writings rebut prior colonial and Mexican depictions of Yaquis—in particular, Véa’s La Maravilla exemplifies the new literary tradition that looks to indigenous oral tradition, religion, and history to address questions of cultural memory and immigration.

Using indigenous forms of knowledge, Tumbaga shows the important and growing body of literary work on Yaqui culture and history that demonstrates the historical and contemporary importance of the Yaqui nation in Mexican and Chicana/o history, politics, and culture.
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cover of Yeats and the Logic of Formalism

Yeats and the Logic of Formalism

Vereen M. Bell

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Yeats and the Logic of Formalism deals with formalism as a philosophy in Yeats’s works and how that in turn affects both his art and his social vision. Vereen M. Bell’s linking of “formalism” and “philosophy” stems from a meditation by Yeats in a manuscript note: “I am always feeling a lack of life's own values behind my
thought. They should have been there before the stream began, before it became necessary to let the work create its values.” In Bell’s reading, formalism is not simply a philosophy of art but a philosophy of life as directed by art—existential at its source and unpredictably political in its applications.
            Bell examines formalism as an ideology and evaluates its credibility in Yeats's practice in relation to other theoretical discourses and in the context of the turbulent cultural and historical circumstances under which Yeats worked. He invokes and elaborates upon Edward Said’s reading of Yeats as a special kind of colonial subject. He revisits in this context the issue of how much Yeats and Nietzsche have in common and argues, in the manner of J. Hillis Miller, that the primordial is for Yeats what formalism ultimately sets itself against.
            Yeats and the Logic of Formalism mediates between older, traditional readings and recent materialist critiques of Yeats’s work in an effort to restore a balanced perspective. The author centers most of his discussion on Yeats's poems as acts of thought, both as poetry and as a body of ideas. Within this context he
maintains that Yeats as a modernist is essentially aligned with Wallace Stevens in the project of creating supreme fictions. Formalism in this function, he argues, is an ideology without  content. As such, it compelled Yeats to remain unsettled in his outlook. On the other hand, it enabled him, as Richard Ellmann has pointed out, to continually adapt and readapt "himself to the changing conditions of his body and mind and of the outside world."
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cover of Yeats's Shakespeare

Yeats's Shakespeare

Rupin W. Desai

Northwestern University Press, 1971

In Yeats's Shakespeare, the first full-length study of Yeats’s interest in Shakespeare, Rupin W. Desai explores how Shakespearean works influenced Yeats’s poetry and mythological drama. Exploring Shakespeare’s sonnets and Yeats’s poetry, Desai illustrates the deep degree to which Yeats identifies with Shakespeare, even to the extent of including some of Shakespeare’s heroes in his own late poetry. Yeats’s Shakespeare also includes an appendix that lists in detail all of Yeats’s references to Shakespeare’s works.
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cover of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Volume XII, 1994

Yeats

An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Volume XII, 1994

Richard J. Finneran, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1996

This latest volume of Yeats continues the tradition of excellence with nine new critical essays and a host of book reviews. Highlights include "Yeats at Fifty," a recent essay by A. Walton Litz; a consideration of the art in the Cuala Press Broadsides by Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux; and a discussion of the textual and interpretive history of The Green Helmet and Other Poems by David Holdeman. Other contributors include Brian Arkins on style in Yeats's poetry, David Clark on "Her Vision in a Wood," Peter Denman on Ferguson and Yeats, Shelley Sharp on Yeats's theater, and Janis E. Tedesco on the sexual dynamic of A Vision. Rounding out the volume are the annual bibliography of Yeats's scholarship by K. P. S. Jochum and a compilation of dissertation abstracts.
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cover of Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet

Yehuda Amichai

The Making of Israel's National Poet

Nili Scharf Gold

Brandeis University Press, 2008

Yehuda Amichai is one of the twentieth century’s (and Israel’s) leading poets. In this remarkable book, Nili Scharf Gold offers a profound reinterpretation of Amichai’s early works and reconstructs his poetic biography. Her close reading of his oeuvre, untapped notebooks, and a cache of unpublished letters to a woman identified as Ruth Z. that Gold discovered convincingly demonstrates how the poet’s German past infused his work, despite his attempts to conceal it as he adopted an Israeli identity.
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cover of Yes, There Will Be Singing

Yes, There Will Be Singing

Marilyn Krysl

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Yes, There Will Be Singing brings together Marilyn Krysl’s essays on the origins of language and poetry, poetic form, the poetry of witness, and poetry’s collaboration with the healing arts. Beginning with pieces on her own origins as a poet, she branches into poetry’s profound spiritual and political possibilities, drawing on rich examples from poets such as Anna Akhmatova, W.S. Merwin, and Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Krysl concludes with a selection of stories of her nursing and humanitarian work, powerfully connecting poetic expression with a generous and compassionate worldview.
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cover of Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji

Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji

G. G. Rowley

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) has long been recognized as one of the most important literary figures of prewar Japan. Her renown derives principally from the passion of her early poetry and from her contributions to 20th-century debates about women. This emphasis obscures a major part of her career, which was devoted to work on the Japanese classics and, in particular, the great Heian period text The Tale of Genji. Akiko herself felt that Genji was the bedrock upon which her entire literary career was built, and her bibliography shows a steadily increasing amount of time devoted to projects related to the tale. This study traces for the first time the full range of Akiko’s involvement with The Tale of Genji.
The Tale of Genji provided Akiko with her conception of herself as a writer and inspired many of her most significant literary projects. She, in turn, refurbished the tale as a modern novel, pioneered some of the most promising avenues of modern academic research on Genji, and, to a great extent, gave the text the prominence it now enjoys as a translated classic. Through Akiko’s work Genji became, in fact as well as in name, an exemplum of that most modern of literary genres, the novel. In delineating this important aspect of Akiko’s life and her bibliography, this study aims to show that facile descriptions of Akiko as a “poetess of passion” or “new woman” will no longer suffice.
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cover of You Alone Are Dancing

You Alone Are Dancing

Brenda Flanagan

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Rape, the devastation of Hurricane Flora, a child's tragic death, and an indifferent and corrupt government are some of the numerous problems challenging the people of Rosehill. Set on the fictional island of Santabella and spanning three years, You Alone Are Dancing follows the life of young Beatrice Salandy, balancing her ambitions, obligations, and love for Sonny Allen. Determined to create his own opportunities, Sonny leaves Rosehill for the United States in a swirl of promises and expectations. Beatrice remains on Rosehill, sharing her neighbors' struggle, adding their pain to her own, but sharing as well their music and their laughter, their history and their allegiance to it. Like Santabella, set in an indifferent blue sea, Rosehill is part of a larger neglected Caribbean society, and Beatrice must learn to negotiate its tides and ebbs, overcome its storm and ensure its lulls, as she peruses what has to be done. She succeeds--but at a price that changes her life forever, as it does that of Sonny and all of Rosehill. "In Brenda Flanagan's novel, You Alone Are Dancing, there's talk and talk, the life-long dance of talk--it's lyrical, raucous, sorrowful, vibrant, inventive. And there you are, on the island, in the midst and mix of it all. What the best musicians do with wood and brass and air, Brenda Flanagan does with words--she gives them voice and life." --Janet Kauffman, author of Places in the World a Woman Could Walk.

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cover of You Are a Ghost

You Are a Ghost

Katherine Guinness

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A ghost story where you are the ghost

What if the ghost haunting the present is you? In You Are a Ghost, Katherine Guinness offers a provocative new theory of “negative hauntology,” arguing that ghostliness is not a metaphor but the defining condition of life under late capitalism. Through compelling readings of films such as The Sixth Sense, Ghost, Beetlejuice, and The Others, alongside television, immersive performance, and contemporary art about platform surveillance and automated intelligence, Guinness reveals how today’s culture reflects a world where futurity, agency, and even humanity have already been lost.

Yet, rather than ending in nihilism, You Are a Ghost imagines a new form of collective consciousness grounded in our shared condition. Bold, accessible, and deeply original, this book rethinks social death, capitalism, and political solidarity, offering readers a new way to understand contemporary culture—and how to haunt it.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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cover of You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body

You Feel So Mortal

Essays on the Body

Peggy Shinner

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Feet, bras, autopsies, hair—Peggy Shinner takes an honest, unflinching look at all of them in You Feel So Mortal, a collection of searing and witty essays about the body: her own body, female and Jewish; those of her parents, the bodies she came from; and the collective body, with all its historical, social, and political implications. What, she asks, does this whole mess of bones, muscles, organs, and soul mean? Searching for answers, she turns her keen narrative sense to body image, gender, ethnic history, and familial legacy, exploring what it means to live in our bodies and to leave them behind.
 
Over the course of twelve essays, Shinner holds a mirror up to the complex desires, fears, confusions, and mysteries that shape our bodily perceptions. Driven by the collision between herself and the larger world, she examines her feet through the often-skewed lens of history to understand what makes them, in the eyes of some, decidedly Jewish; considers bras, breasts, and the storied skills of the bra fitter; asks, from the perspective of a confused and grieving daughter, what it means to cut the body open; and takes a reeling time-trip through myth, culture, and history to look at women’s hair in ancient Rome, Laos, France, Syria, Cuba, India, and her own past. Some pieces investigate the body under emotional or physical duress, while others use the body to consider personal heritage and legacy. Throughout, Shinner writes with elegance and assurance, weaving her wide-ranging thoughts into a firm and fascinating fabric.
 
Turning the category of body books on, well, its ear, You Feel So Mortal offers a probing view of our preoccupation with the body that is both idiosyncratic and universal, leaving us with the deep satisfaction of our shared humanity.
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cover of You Must Revise Your Life

You Must Revise Your Life

William Stafford

University of Michigan Press, 1987

Stafford reflects on the writing process and on the influences on his art
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cover of You're Only Young Twice: Children's Literature and Film

You're Only Young Twice

Children's Literature and Film

Tim Morris

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Original and thought-provoking, You're Only Young Twice reveals the complexities that underlie even the sparest picture book text and the lessons that reside in even the most familiar family movie plots.
 
Moving from classic texts (The Secret Garden, Goodnight Moon) to ephemera (the Hardy Boys, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter series), from the printed page to the silver screen (Willie Wonka, Jumanji, 101 Dalmatians, Beethoven), Tim Morris employs his experience as a parent and teacher to interrogate children's culture and reveal its conflicting messages.
 
Books and films for children--favorites accepted as wholesome fare for impressionable young minds --do not always teach straightforward lessons. Instead, they reflect the anxieties of the times and the desires of adults. At the heart of many a children's classic lies power, often expressed through racism, sexism, or violence. Under Morris's gaze, revered animal stories like Black Beauty turn into litanies of abuse; fantasies of childhood like Big are revealed as patriarchal struggles.
 
You're Only Young Twice redirects the focus on children's literature, asking not "What messages should children receive?" but "What messages do adults actually send?" For example, Morris recounts his own childhood confusion upon viewing Peter Pan, with its queenish, inept pirate and a grown woman (Mary Martin) in tights who pretends to be a crowing boy.
Morris shatters our long-held assumptions and challenges our best intentions, demonstrating how children's literature and films lay bare a troubled and troubling worldview.
 
 
 
 
 
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cover of Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel

Young Lions

How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel

Leah Garrett

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Awards in the American Jewish Studies category 
Winner, 2017 AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Modern Jewish History and Culture: Africa, Americas, Asia, and Oceania

Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new “Jewish” war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.

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cover of Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez

Your Brain on Latino Comics

From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez

By Frederick Luis Aldama

University of Texas Press, 2009

Though the field of comic book studies has burgeoned in recent years, Latino characters and creators have received little attention. Putting the spotlight on this vibrant segment, Your Brain on Latino Comics illuminates the world of superheroes Firebird, Vibe, and the new Blue Beetle while also examining the effects on readers who are challenged to envision such worlds.

Exploring mainstream companies such as Marvel and DC as well as rising stars from other segments of the industry, Frederick Aldama provides a new reading of race, ethnicity, and the relatively new storytelling medium of comics themselves. Overview chapters cover the evolution of Latino influences in comics, innovations, and representations of women, demonstrating Latino transcendence of many mainstream techniques. The author then probes the rich and complex ways in which such artists affect the cognitive and emotional responses of readers as they imagine past, present, and future worlds.

Twenty-one interviews with Latino comic book and comic strip authors and artists, including Laura Molina, Frank Espinosa, and Rafael Navarro, complete the study, yielding captivating commentary on the current state of the trade, cultural perceptions, and the intentions of creative individuals who shape their readers in powerful ways.

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cover of Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds

Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

Wendy Xu

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Moving freely between essay, close-reading, ekphrasis, memoir, travelogue, lecture notes, poetry, and even monologue, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds presents a series of “thinking-throughs” of formally innovative and politically oriented poets pushing the boundaries of what poetry can hold. Tracing a personal family history of immigration amidst larger concerns of diaspora, “unsayability,” and absence, Wendy Xu reads the work of poets including Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean Vuong, Liu Xia, giovanni singleton, Bei Dao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others. She explores existential and pedagogical questions in poetry from the point of view of a reader and a teacher. Why write? and why invite the paradoxes of a documentary approach into that writing? 

Not an overview or primer, least of all the final word, this free-ranging exploration of contemporary poetry considers larger questions of belonging, diaspora, the violence of language, the allure of the past, genre, witness, and form. It returns to memorable touchstone texts in the author’s life with renewed curiosity about their inner workings. Essays move with restless curiosity across topics, bringing them into conversation with poetry, from considering depictions of Christ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, to the ecstatic illegible texts of Henri Michaux, discomfiting likenesses of agoraphobia and political imprisonment, and the epistolary trouble of fan-mail. Xu is drawn to poetry works of radical hybridity alongside personal experiences of formal intensity, as an immigrant daughter, a parentified child, an occasional agoraphobe, and a writer. Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds is a tour of poetic influences and the futures they’ve made possible.
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cover of Yun Dong-ju: A Critical Biography

Yun Dong-ju

A Critical Biography

Song WooHye

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Historian and novelist Song WooHye chronicles the life of Yun Dong-ju (1917-1945), one of the most beloved and important poets in the modern Korean literary canon, widely considered Korea's "National Poet". Beginning with the history of the North Gando region (now Yanbian, China), where Yun was born, and ending with facts behind the publication of his only and posthumous poetry collection, Sky, Wind, Star, and Poem, this critical biography elucidates who Yun Dong-ju really was, with factual descriptions of the bleak and turbulent period of Japan’s colonization of Korea.
 
While first working on the book in the 1980s, Song had interviewed the poet’s surviving relatives and friends, most of whom have since passed away. Without her interviews, these important first-hand accounts would have been lost. Song had an added advantage of an “insider,” as she is a niece of Song Mong-gyu, who was the poet’s first cousin and inseparable friend for life. Incorporating newly discovered materials and using interviews with the beloved poet's family and friends, this biography is the most comprehensive, definitive biography of Yun Dong-ju to date, now available in English for the first time.
 

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). 

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