{"title":"Amy Hungerford","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"postmodern-belief-book-amy-hungerford-9780691145754","title":"Postmodern Belief","description":"How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50127552250129,"sku":"GOR008308009","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52736570720529,"sku":"NIN9780691145754","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53269867004177,"sku":"GOR014848461","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/069114575X.jpg?v=1750977165"},{"product_id":"making-literature-now-book-amy-hungerford-9780804799409","title":"Making Literature Now","description":"How does new writing emerge and find readers today? Why does one writer's work become famous while another's remains invisible? Making Literature Now tells the stories of the creators, editors, readers, and critics who make their living by making literature itself come alive. The book shows how various conditions—including gender, education, business dynamics, social networks, money, and the forces of literary tradition—affect the things we can choose, or refuse, to read.    Amy Hungerford focuses her discussion on literary bestsellers as well as little-known traditional and digital literature from smaller presses, such as McSweeney's. She deftly matches the particular human stories of the makers with the impersonal structures through which literary reputation is made. Ranging from fine-grained ethnography to polemical argument, this book transforms our sense of how and why new literature appears—and disappears—in contemporary American culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50366182719761,"sku":"CIN0804799407VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007521227025,"sku":"NIN9780804799409","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0804799407.jpg?v=1757415169"},{"product_id":"holocaust-of-texts-book-amy-hungerford-9780226360768","title":"The Holocaust of Texts","description":"Why do we so often speak of books as living, flourishing, and dying? This habit of treating books as people, or personifying texts, is rampant in postwar American culture. In this bracing study, Amy Hungerford argues that personification has become pivotal to our understanding of both literature and of genocide. Personified texts, she contends, appear frequently in works where the systematic destruction of entire ethnic groups is at issue. Hungerford examines the implications of this trend in a broad range of texts: Art Spiegelman's \"Maus\"; Ray Bradbury's \"Fahrenheit 451\"; the poetry of Sylvia Plath; Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake Holocaust memoir \"Fragments\"; the fiction of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo; and the work of contemporary trauma theorists and literaty critics. Ultimately, she argues that the personification of texts in these works is ethically corrosive. When we exalt the literary as personal and construe genocide as less a destruction of human life than of culture, we esteem memory over learning, short-circuit debates about cultural extinction, and drastically limit our conception of literature and its purpose.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50509308625169,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50509309378833,"sku":"GOR007002429","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226360768.jpg?v=1750779585"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-amy-hungerford.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}