Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Part I. Into this World: Body and Spirit in Contemporary Literature

1. Embracing the Fall: Reconfiguring Redemption in Jim Harrison’s The Woman Lit by Fireflies, Dalva and The Road Home
Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

2. Writing Back through the Body: The Communion of Flesh and Spirit in the Work of Mary Swander
Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

3. Always Becoming: The Nature of Transcendence in the Poetry of Mary Oliver
Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

Part II. Story and Possibility: Narrative Mapping as Ethical Construct

4. Saints, Sinners, and the Dickensian Novel: The Ethics of Storytelling in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules

Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

5. Curses and Blessings: Identity and Essentialism in the Work of Sherman Alexie
Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

6. “Our long national nightmare is over”: Moral Repair and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides

Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

7. “What’s Filipino? What’s authentic? What’s in the blood?”: Alterity and Ethics in the Novels of Jessica Hagedorn
Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

Part III. Music, Image, and Activism: A Means to an Open Ending

8. “Everybody had a hard year”: The White Album and the Beatles’ Poetics of Apocalypse
Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

9. Finding Forgiveness, or Something Like It, in David Mamet’s House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner and State and Main

Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

10. Performing Empowerment: Revisiting Liberation Pedagogy in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues

Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

11. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Magnolia?

Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

12. Conclusion: Postmodern Humanism and the Ethical Future
Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

Keywords: Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, Contemporary Literature