American Literature current issue

The Pequot Conspirator

White, E. — 2009-09-18

Historical interpretations of the Anglo-Pequot War have oscillated between ethnographic and conspiratorial explanations, arguing that it resulted either from cultural differences and misunderstandings or from scheming and provocation. But seventeenth-century accounts of the conflict demonstrate the interconnectedness of the ethnographic and conspiratorial frameworks, going as far as to suggest that the Pequots, one of the first Native American groups referred to by name, conspiratorially used their "Indianness" as a weapon. Tracing this connection, from the narratives of Philip Vincent and John Mason to those of John Underhill and Lion Gardiner, helps us better appreciate the racial origins of seventeenth-century conspiracy thought.

Mary Rowlandson's Hunger and the Historiography of Sexuality

Stein, J. A. — 2009-09-18

Stein's essay argues that within the inquiry called "the history of sexuality," a critical preoccupation with the materiality of bodies has occasioned some inattention to the experience and cultivation of sensations, which are clearly not reducible to somatic responses but which are just as clearly significant to the historical development of modern sexuality. Expanding the repertoire of sexuality to include the cultivation of sensations makes it possible to connect sexuality with other phenomena to which sexuality is generally considered to be unrelated. Representations of hunger in Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, serve as the essay's principal case study. The essay argues that rethinking the history of sexuality in terms of the cultivation of sensations forces a reconsideration of the archives from which examples of pre- and early modern sexuality are drawn—a reconsideration that nominates aesthetic representations, rather than empirical evidence, as key sites of sexuality's modern articulation. The essay concludes that any concern for the manner in which the articulation of sensation produces human interiority would be a matter of "sexuality" under historical circumstances where genitals did not dominate understandings of that term.

Spirits of Emulation: Readers, Samplers, and the Republican Girl, 1787-1810

Howell, W. H. — 2009-09-18

Howell considers the arts of imitation and emulation as practiced by U.S. girls at the turn of the nineteenth century. He takes the best-selling novels and schoolbooks of Susanna Rowson as a starting point for reading a broad set of material-cultural artifacts, including embroideries, penmanship exercises, and recital performances. Although historians and literary critics have tended to deride such productions as "social accomplishments,"—as markers of a misogynist and antidemocratic ethos of "refinement"—this essay reads them as technologies of socialization. Aligning imitative and derivative aesthetics with sympathy and intersubjectivity, the essay argues that texts created by and for young women can offer critical insight into the twinned processes of individuation and deindividuation at the heart of "republican" theories of the subject. That is, it contends that "women's work" and the theories behind it afford not only an important purchase on preromantic genealogies of the self, but also more inclusive perspectives on the political history of the early United States.

The Mayor of San Juan del Norte? Nicaragua, Martin Delany, and the "Cotton" Americans

Mattox, J. — 2009-09-18

According to his 1868 biography, in 1852 Martin Delany had been elected mayor of the Nicaraguan town of San Juan del Norte, a port attracting gold rush travelers, international capitalists, canal engineers, Miskito Indians, free African Americans, and British subjects. This claim was especially notable because Delany, the African American doctor, antislavery lecturer, journalist, and author, had never set foot in Central America. Mattox's essay examines archival accounts of the actual election that took place in San Juan del Norte, including items in the African American press; in the election, a "native and colored party" opposed the "Cotton" party, which included Anglo-Americans from the U.S. South. Mattox reads these accounts in context with addresses Delany gave on the topic of emigration and with two of his major published works: his multigenre The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) and his serially published novel of circum-Caribbean slave insurrection, Blake (1859, 1861–62). Mattox argues that in an antebellum era marked by struggles over the rights of black Americans and by growing U.S. hemispheric claims, the attention of Delany and others in the United States to Nicaragua, a globally crucial location of transit, encompasses both the multiple ideologies of mobility and an expansive and contested definition of American nationality and citizenship.

"Geographical Morality": Place and the Problem of Patriotism in John W. De Forest's Civil War Realism

LeMenager, S. — 2009-09-18

John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty was written from 1864 to 1867, when Reconstruction still had a chance of changing the face of American reality. It could be called the only U.S. realist novel that reports to us from within this moment of tremendous potential, an imaginative hiatus between the Civil War's derealization of the national culture and the post-Reconstruction emergence of a powerful nation-state. The novel foreshadows contemporary debates about cultural nationalism versus liberal, rights-based citizenship as it works through compelling counternarratives to constitutional patriotism, models of local attachment that De Forest recognizes as the political sensibility of "geographical morality." Geographical morality implies allegiance to a prediscursive and so-called natural state whose limits are set by climate and human biology. Like Walt Whitman, who was also fascinated by the erotics of patriotism, De Forest explores the durability of local passions, of sectionalism and sex, in the face of constitutional idealism, the Unionism that became the hegemonic feeling-state decided by the Civil War. Through discussion of Miss Ravenel alongside Whitman's Specimen Days and De Forest's short fiction, essays, and later novels, this essay explores the larger question of how literature has attempted to make the "social passion" of patriotism available to the senses.

Disappeared Men: Chicana/o Authenticity and the American War in Viet Nam

Cutler, J. A. — 2009-09-18

Although Chicanos died in the American war in Viet Nam in disproportionate numbers, they do not figure significantly into well-known literary accounts of the war. Nor do Chicana/o narratives of the war begin to appear in substantial numbers until the 1990s, two decades after the war ended. This gap results in part from familiar ethnocentrism in publishing and in part from a deleterious formulation of masculine authenticity in Chicano nationalist texts, which favored representations of aggressive Chicano protestors over those of ambivalent Chicano soldiers. In contrast to the masculine bravado of Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People (1975), for example, Alfredo Véa's 1998 novel Gods Go Begging demonstrates the tension between the warrior male ideal of Chicano nationalism and the divided loyalties of Chicano soldiers. Gods Go Begging also continues a tradition in Chicano Viet Nam war literature of analogizing Chicanos and Vietnamese revolutionaries, a potentially radical kinship undercut by the material realities of national and cultural loyalties. Patricia Santana's 2002 novel Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility suggests the centrality of the war for a rising generation of Chicana activists, highlighting how the absence of young men from Mexican families laid bare the gender dynamics of family life. Véa's and Santana's novels revise familiar narratives of the Chicana/o movement, calling attention not to the way the movement was parochial and sexist, an oversimplification, but rather to how problems of gender and ethnic authenticity have complicated the movement from the beginning.

Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940; The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade

Freeburg, C. C. — 2009-09-18

Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature; Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry

Klimasmith, B. — 2009-09-18

Dark Victorians; Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World; The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture; The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

Wong, E. — 2009-09-18

Passive Constitutions, or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby; Impersonality: Seven Essays

Nudelman, F. — 2009-09-18

Melville: The Making of the Poet; Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation

Egan, H. — 2009-09-18

Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from beyond the Empty Screen; Race, Nationalism, and the State in British and American Modernism; Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday

Reid, C. E. — 2009-09-18

The Man Who Adores the Negro: Race and American Folklore; The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction

Byerman, K. — 2009-09-18

Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition; Black Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters

Giles, J. R. — 2009-09-18

Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms; Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature; Cuban Currency: The Dollar and "Special Period" Fiction

Chancy, M. J. A. — 2009-09-18

Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust; Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity

Schachter, A. — 2009-09-18

The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II; Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates

Jarrett, G. A. — 2009-09-18

The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison

Arac, J. — 2009-09-18

Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape; The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

Kennedy, V. — 2009-09-18

Postmodern American Literature and Its Other; Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database; From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction

Jagoda, P. — 2009-09-18

Other

2009-09-18

Other

2009-09-18