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American Revenge Narratives critically examines the nation's vengeful storytelling tradition. With essays on late twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, film, and television, it maps the coordinates of the revenge genre's contemporary reinvention across American culture. By surveying American revenge narratives, this book measures how contemporary payback plots appraise the nation's political, social, and economic inequities.
The volume's essays collectively make the case that retribution is a defining theme of post-war American culture and an artistic vehicle for critique. In another sense, this book presents a scholarly coming to terms with the nation's love for vengeance. By investigating recent iterations of an ancient genre, contributors explore how the revenge narrative evolves andthrives within American literary and filmic imagination. Taken together, the book's diverse chapters attempt to understand American culture's seemingly inexhaustible production of vengeful tales.
List of contents
1. Introduction - Kyle Wiggins.- 2. Wakening "The Eyes of Dreamers": Revenge in Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café - Lisa Hoffman-Reyes.- 3. Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Tragedy of Revenge and Reparation - Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem.- 4. Masculinity in Don DeLilllo's White Noise: Mapping the Self, Killing the Other - Michael James Rizza.- 5. From Revenge to Restorative Justice in Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves, The Round House, and LaRose - Seema Kurup.- 6. The Great (White) Wail: Percival Everett's The Water Cure and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia - Beth A. McCoy.- 7. The Modern American Revenge Story - Kyle Wiggins.- 8. "What if nature were trying to get back at us?": Animals as Agents of Nature's Revenge in Horror Cinema - Michael Fuchs.- 9. A Cinema of Vengeance: Vietnam Veterans, Traumatic Recovery, and Historical Revisionism in 1980s Hollywood - Marc Diefenderfer.- 10. Vengeance is Mine: Gender and Vigilante Justice in Mainstream Cinema - Paul Doro.- 11. "Revenge, at first though sweet, / Bitter ere long back on itself recoils:" Patriarchy and Revenge in Unforgiven and True Grit - Jim Daems.- 12. Tearing Down the Eiffel Tower: Post-9/11 Fears and Fantasies in Taken - Terence McSweeney.
About the author
Kyle Wiggins is Lecturer of Rhetoric at Boston University, USA, where he teaches courses on writing, argumentation, and research methods. His work has appeared in
Postmodern Culture,
Great Plains Quarterly,
Studies in the Novel, and other publications.
Summary
American Revenge Narratives critically examines the nation’s vengeful storytelling tradition. With essays on late twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, film, and television, it maps the coordinates of the revenge genre’s contemporary reinvention across American culture. By surveying American revenge narratives, this book measures how contemporary payback plots appraise the nation’s political, social, and economic inequities.
The volume’s essays collectively make the case that retribution is a defining theme of post-war American culture and an artistic vehicle for critique. In another sense, this book presents a scholarly coming to terms with the nation’s love for vengeance. By investigating recent iterations of an ancient genre, contributors explore how the revenge narrative evolves andthrives within American literary and filmic imagination. Taken together, the book’s diverse chapters attempt to understand American culture’s seemingly inexhaustible production of vengeful tales.
