The Secret Country

Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips’ Cryptic Fiction
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-90-420-2140-2
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 165, 291 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 508 g

Reihe: Costerus New Series

The Secret Country is the first monograph on the work of the contemporary American novelist Jayne Anne Phillips. Through detailed and innovative textual analysis this study considers the southern aspects of Phillips’ writing. Robertson demonstrates the importance of Phillips’ place within the southern literary canon by identifying the echoes of William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Edgar Allan Poe that permeate her work.
Phillips’ complex attachments to a regional past are explored through both psychoanalytical and historical materialist approaches, revealing not only the writer’s distinctly southern preoccupations, but also her reflections on contemporary American society. Tracing the family dynamics in Phillips’ work from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this book examines the effects of increased modernization and capitalization on everyday interactions, and questions the nature of the author’s backward glance to the past. This volume is of interest for a wide audience, particularly students and scholars of contemporary southern and American literature.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Prologue
Chapter One: Accessing the Secret Country
Chapter Two: Nameless Implications: The Haunting Vestiges of the Paternal Past in Machine Dreams
Chapter Three: A House Divided: Class Divergence in Machine Dreams
Chapter Four: Preparing for Take-Off: Autochthony and Flight in Machine Dreams
Chapter Five: Structures of Retrospect: The Inescapable Past in Fast Lanes
Chapter Six: Dislocations: Retracing the Erased in Shelter
Chapter Seven: Fantastical Remembrances: Sexual Desire in Shelter
Chapter Eight: Leaving the Fatherland: Emasculation and Exodus in Shelter
Chapter Nine: The Experience of Separation in MotherKind
Chapter Ten: Textured Memories: The Remnants of a Paternal Past in MotherKind
Chapter Eleven: Almost Magical: Once upon a time … in MotherKind
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Sarah Robertson is a Senior Lecturer of American Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol.