Ellen McCracken

Winner of the Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library AssociationAs a teenager, Manuel Chávez (1910-1996) left his native New Mexico for over a decade of study at the St. Francis Seraphic Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and other midwestern institutions. Included in his curriculum was an introduction to literature and the arts that piqued an interest that would follow him the remainder of his life. Upon returning to New Mexico, he was ordained Fray Angélico Chávez and would become one of New Mexico's most important twentieth-century writers. In The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez, Ellen McCracken provides a literary biography that includes a deep look into the intellectual and cultural contributions of this Renaissance man. McCracken moves chronologically through a substantial body of work that includes fiction, poetry, plays, essays, spiritual tracts, sermons, historical writing, translation, painting, church renovation, and journalism. From the prolific creativity of the years of his first assignment in Peña Blanca to the decades he spent researching Hispano genealogy in New Mexico, McCracken traces Chávez's complex and changing identity as an ethnic American and religious subject who was also an historian, artist, creative writer, and preservationist. The year 2010 will mark the centenary of Fray Angélico Chávez's birth, and this volume will serve as a fitting tribute.

Part of a new phase of post-1960s U.S. Latino literature, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros both engage in unique networks of paratexts that center on the performance of latinidad. Here, Ellen McCracken re-envisions Gérard Genette's paratexts for the present day, arguing that the Internet increases the range, authorship, and reach of the paratextual portals and that they constitute a key element of the creative process of Latino literary production in 21st century America. This smart and useful book examines how both novelists interact with the interplay of populist and hegemonic multiculturalism and allows new points of entry into these novels.

A study of the more than fifty US and International glossy publications for women. This analysis focuses on the strategies by which the commercial structure shapes the cultural content, the magazines' repetitive attempts to secure a consensus about the feminine that is grounded in consumerism, and the contradictory semiotic structures at work within and between purchased ads, covert ads, and editorial features.