Two discourses on modern social identity
The May 8 edition of the Times Higher Education ran several noteworthy reviews of Chicago books including Scott Herring’s Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920.
Both books focus on the subject of social identification in the early twentieth century, the former delivering an insightful critique of American “slumming literature” and the gender stereotypes that the author claims the genre simultaneously acknowledged, yet undermined, while the latter gives an equally penetrating analysis of the re-making of Italian cultural identity in the wake of WWI.
Read Denis Flanery’s review of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History.
You can find Steven Gundle’s review of The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920 in the same issue.
A book published by Liverpool University Press, one of our distributed clients, was also reviewed in the May 8 THE. Read Martin Conreen’s review of SK-INTERFACES: Exploding Borders in Art, Science and Technology.