Circling Marilyn approaches the famous star in a manner that recognizes the impossibility of ever locating the "real" Marilyn Monroe. The book gets close to the actress by discussing the chameleonic performances of Marilyn as woman, star, and text. Like Elvis, Marilyn lives, because she has become a discourse articulating major issues in the cultures she inhabits, whether in the 1950s or in the 21st century. In circling "Marilyn country," this book discusses Marilyn Monroe as text, since those who knew and did not know her - husbands, lovers, fans, writers, directors, co-stars, critics - have written about Marilyn differently, and endlessly. Circling Marilyn also scrutinizes Marilyn as 'body, ' but it locates not just one body, but many, including a disciplined and a communicative body. Other chapters consider the performing Marilyn and Marilyn performed. Marilyn takes on various roles as herself, as a cowgirl on the last frontier, and as a 'white and black' woman - destabilizing conventional categories of race and becoming whiter and whiter to the point where she combines whiteness and death. Others play Marilyn by snatching her famous body for their own purposes, at gay parades or in cyberspace. Circling Marilyn is for those whose appetite for Marilyn Monroe keeps her alive, if eternally elusive

This collection brings together new and original critical essays by eleven established European American Studies scholars to explore the 1960s from a transatlantic perspective. Intended for an academic audience interested in globalized American studies, it examines topics ranging from the impact of the American civil rights movement in Germany, France and Wales, through the transatlantic dimensions of feminism and the counterculture movement. It explores, for example, the vicissitudes of Europe's status in US foreign relations, European documentaries about the Vietnam War, transatlantic trends in literature and culture, and the significance of collective and cultural memory of the era.

This book brings together a group of women interested in, even consumed by, the region they inhabit physically or mentally. All of them search for a language that will accurately represent their life experiences, whether at a remote plantation in antebellum Georgia or in an Alabama institution for the criminally insane. This book contains critical essays on the autobiographical writings of southern women from the past and present, and women well-known such as Mary Chesnut, Fanny Kemble and Alice Walker, to those less well-known such as Kate Stone. The self-narratives critiqued in this volume propel themselves and their authors to the center of critical debates concerning the status of the subject, the nature of self-representation, the globalization of the regional, cultural hybridities, and the negotiations and compromises required for co-existence. Read through theoretical lenses, their texts map new representational spaces, alternative (textual) bodies, and reinventions of categories such as "region," "race," and "women."

This is an interdisciplinary analysis of the interaction between today's globalisation and Americanisation. Transnationalism involves a loosening of boundaries, a deterritorialisation of the nation-state, and higher degrees of interconnectedness among cultures and peoples across the globe. As people make transnational voyages and live lives of flexible citizenship in two or more cultures, they adhere to a new type of nationalism that creates an exclusionist discourse and builds the Other as conservative defenders of cruder territorial loyalties. This transnational solidarity -- a new communitarianism beyond the loyalties to any one place or ethnic group -- threatens the old order with its conceptions that assimilation and integration will remake the foreigner into a particular national citizen. The authors address the complex issues of globalisation, American mythology, Christian proselytising, modern slavery, conspiracy theory, apocalyptic terrorism, Vietnam stories, international feminism, changing gender roles, resurgent regionalism and the changing definitions of place.