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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.
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THE POETICS OF INSECURITY 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. Johannes Voelz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany. In 2016, he was awarded a Heisenberg-Professorship by the German Research Foundation. He is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (2010) and has edited several books and special issues, among them “Security and Liberalism,” a theme issue of Telos (Spring 2015) and “Chance, Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature,” a theme issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies (Fall 2015). C am b r i dge Stu di es i n A me rica n L i ter atu re and Cu lture Editor Ross Posnock, Columbia University Founding Editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory Board Robert Levine, University of Maryland Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago Recent books in this series 165. JOHANNES VOELZ The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat 164. JOHN HAY Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature 163. PAUL JAUSSEN Writing in Real Time 162. CINDY WEINSTEIN Time, Tense, and American Literature: When Is Now? 161. STACEY MARGOLIS Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America 160. PAUL DOWNES Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature 159. CODY MARRS Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War 158. DAVID BERGMAN The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry 157. MARK NOBLE American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens (continued after Index) THE POETICS OF INSECURITY American Fiction and the Uses of Threat J O H A N N E S VO E L Z Goethe-Universität Frankfurt University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United K