Flip Sides: New Critical Essays on American Literature

Flip Sides is a collection of critical essays by young scholars of American Studies. The contributors focus on writers, themes, and motifs which to date have been neglected in pertinent studies on American litearature. The collection covers a wide spectrum of critical methods, ranging from biographical analysis, gynocriticism and feminism to poststructuralism. The first essays examine texts by nineteeth-century writers, Balduin Moellhausen and Elizabeth Stoddard. The middle section is dedicated to twentieth-century African American literature, including essays on Toni Morrison, the concepts of liberation and love in black women’s literature, and John Wideman. The last two essays, on Joan Didion and Rolando Hinojosa, continue the critical disussion of literary postmodernism started in the essay on Wideman.