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Naming the Father is a collection of essays on the subject of fatherhood: its enduring power, its secret roses, its unsettling provocations. Despite the considerable critical attention devoted to motherhood in literature -- and despite the late-twentieth-century focus on patriarchy -- there is surprisingly no comparable collection on fatherhood. This volume was born of the conclusion that critics of modern and contemporary literature may comprehend the father too little for presuming to have comprehended patriarchy so much.
List of contents
chapter 1 Acknowledgments chapter 2 Introduction: Naming the Dead Father chapter 3 Part One: The Father in Memory. The Business of Mourning chapter 4 Two Fingers of Chat chapter 5 The Culture of My Childhood. Part Two: Fathers in Ethnic Culture. Performative Fathers and the Inessential Macho: Fatherhood in Contemporary Latino/Latina Literature chapter 6 Negations and Subversions of Paternal Authorities in Glissant's Fictional Works (Le Quatrime Sicle, La Case du commandeur, Tout-monde) chapter 7 Holy and Unholy Ghosts: The Legacy of the Father in the Plays of August Wilson. Part Three: Fathers and Daughters. The Legacy of "The Unspeakable Father" in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove chapter 8 Generating Alternative Representations of Fatherhood: Anzia Yezierska and Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Narrative Spaces for Male Others chapter 9 The Daughters of Memory: The Modernist Poet as Father. Part Four: Beyond the Father. Oedipus and the Modernist Aesthetic: Reconceiving the Social in Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier chapter 10 Naming the Father: Genealogy, Spectacle, and Jack Nicholson in Going Native chapter 11 Original Chaos Restored: Paternal Fictions in William S. Burroughs chapter 12 Works Cited chapter 13 Index
About the author
Eva Paulino Bueno is professor of literature at Mukogawa Women's University in Japan. Terry Caesar is senior professor of American literature at Mukogawa Women's University. William Hummel received his Ph.D. in American Literature from Arizona State University in 1999.
