Loose Ends
Subtitle: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text (New Americanists)
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: December 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780822318873
Subjects: Cultural studies; Ethnic studies; Literary studies: general; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; American English; English; Sociology; USA; American Studies; Literary Studies/American Lite; American - General; American literature; History and criticism; Literature and society; Social problems in literature; United States; Wheatley, Phillis,
Description: In this study of American cultural production from the colonial era to the present, Russell Reising takes up the loose ends of popular American narratives to craft a new theory of narrative closure. In the range of works examined here Reising finds endings that violate all existing theories of closure, and narratives that expose the often unarticulated issues that inspired these texts.

Pursuing the implications of these failed moments of closure, Reising elaborates on topics ranging from the roots of domestic violence and mass murder in early American religious texts to the pornographic imperative of mid-century nature writing, and from James's "descent" into naturalist and feminist fiction to Dumbo's explosive projection of commercial, racial, and political agendas for postwar U.S. culture.