The Poetics of Insecurity
American Fiction and the Uses of Threat

The Poetics of Insecurity explores how American literary writers forged a cultural imaginary in which insecurity acts as an enlivening force.

Johannes Voelz (Author)

9781108407861, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 January 2022

260 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

'The strength of Voelz's readings lies in their attentiveness to the ambivalent affective dimensions of insecurity, the intermingling of fear and desire that accompanies the contemplation of an uncertain future.' Deborah Thurman, The Review of English Studies

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.

1. Introduction: security and the uncertain worlds of fiction
2. The virtue of uncertainty: securing the republic in Arthur Mervyn
3. Harriet Jacobs's imagined community of insecurity
4. Willa Cather and the security of radical contingency
5. Cold War liberalism and Flannery O'Connor's 'The Displaced Person'
6. In the future, toward death: finance capitalism and security in DeLillo's cosmopolis
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]