The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 165)

The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life. This book turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life Introduction : Security And The Uncertain Worlds Of Fiction -- The Virtue Of Uncertainty : Securing The Republic In Arthur Mervyn -- Harriet Jacobs's Imagined Community Of Insecurity -- Willa Cather And The Security Of Radical Contingency -- Cold War Liberalism And Flannery O'connor's The Displaced Person -- In The Future, Toward Death : Finance Capitalism And Security In Delillo's Cosmopolis -- Epilogue. Johannes Voelz, Goethe-universität Frankfurt. Series Numbering Should Read: 179. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 189-242) And Index. The Poetics of Insecurity addresses a key concern of modern America - security - through close readings of American literary works. It combines literary studies with the philosophy of time and sociological theories of modernity, and provides new approaches to canonical American authors from the past two centuries. The Poetics of Insecurity explores how American literary writers forged a cultural imaginary in which insecurity acts as an enlivening force