Michael Moon

Summary:Focusing on intersecting issues of nation, race, and gender, this volume inaugurates new models for American literary and cultural history. Subjects and Citizens reveals the many ways in which a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing contends with the most crucial social, political, and literary issues of our past and present. Defining the landscape of the New American literary history, these essays are united by three interrelated concerns: ideas of origin (where does ""American literature"" begin?), ideas of nation (what does ""American literature"" mean?), and idea

Summary:"Within twelve years of the first appearance of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman produced three other editions. Michael Moon, interpreting "revision" more profoundly than earlier Whitman critics have done, while treating the poet's homosexuality as a cultural and political as well as a biographical fact, shows how Whitman's continual modifications of his work intersect with the representations of male-male desire throughout his writing. What is subjected to endless revision throughout the first four editions of Leaves of Grass is a historically specific set of principles governing how the human body was conceptualized and controlled in mid-ninteenth century America

Summary:In A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon makes a contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of sexuality and identity in modern American culture. He explores a wide array of literary, artistic, and theatrical performances, ranging from the memoirs of Henry James and the dances of Vaslav Nijinsky to the Pop paintings of Andy Warhol and such films as Midnight Cowboy, Blue Velvet, and Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures. Moon illuminates the careers of James, Warhol, and others by examining the imaginative investments of their protogay childhoods in their work in ways that enable new, more complex cultural readings. Moon reveals how the works of these artists emerge from an engagement that is obsessive to the point of "queerness." Rich in historical detail and insistent in its melding of the recent with the remote, the literary with the visual, the popular with the elite, A Small Boy and Others presents a hitherto unimagined tradition of queer invention

Summary:Focuses on the artist Henry Darger, an eccentric and self-taught artist whose work was only discovered after his death. This title shows how Darger drew on novels, comics, pulps, and the history of his time to produce a sometimes disturbing and sometimes joyful but always imaginative alternative world.

A retelling for younger readers of tales told by Scheherazade to amuse the cruel sultan and stop him from executing her as he had his other daily wives.