American Literature recent issues

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

Probably Poe

Lee, M. S. — 2009-05-19

Edgar Allan Poe's texts famously set reason against irrationality, usually formulated in terms of gothic horror, linguistic indeterminacy, psychosexual anxiety, racial fear, or some combination thereof. The disruptive power of chance is less noticed but nonetheless crucial to Poe's writings about the limits of reason, particularly his tales of ratiocination—"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842–43), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Exploring emergent sciences of chance through his polymath investigator Dupin, Poe's use of probability theory matters in a number of registers. His tales of ratiocination confront the challenge of skepticism by working with, not against, scientific discourses of the time, suggesting that the relationship between science and romanticism is not as oppositional as it is sometimes taken to be. Concepts of chance also influence Poe's literary practice and theory, offering a framework for an aesthetic that turns out to be surprisingly realistic. Finally, as a writer attuned to popular culture, Poe both critiques and reflects everyday forms of probabilistic thinking, thus (as odd as it may sound) helping to define what it means to act rationally in mid-nineteenth-century America. By focusing on chance, we can understand Poe less as a proto-poststructuralist and more as a writer who anticipates the rise of pragmatism. It has long been recognized that Poe asks some of the hardest philosophical questions. His encounters with chance show that he has more answers than his critics have often supposed.

Whitman's Atom and the Crisis of Materiality in the Early Leaves of Grass

Noble, M. — 2009-05-19

Noble's essay examines Walt Whitman's investment in an often radical materialization of subjectivity, which both underlies his earliest claims to reinvent embodied experience and brings his poetic project to crisis. In the 1855 Leaves, Whitman's enthusiasm for the popular science of his era leads to the adoption of a progressive atomism that relocates the spiritual power of subjectivity within the material. "Song of Myself" thus develops a chemistry of embodied presence that makes it possible to demonstrate that "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." In 1856, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" extends the reach of Whitman's materialist poetics by supplementing the perceptual mechanics of Lucretian physics (in which the sentient body is composed of and sustained by the flow of objects toward it) in order to produce a material subject capable, however ironically, of transcending material limitations. Many of Whitman's 1860 poems, however, also encounter a deathliness of matter (the speaker figured as a "trail of drift and debris," for instance, in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life"). In his "Calamus" cluster especially, Whitman speaks as though from the margins of his own oeuvre, laboring to fashion a temporary space from which poems of democratic adhesion might be uttered. If in 1856 the atom enables the poet to transcend space and time, in 1860 he may convert matter into spirit, but he may not outlive it. Read in this light, Whitman's early editions of Leaves record an important ambivalence about the plenitudes secured by materialist thinking.

Reading Democratically: Pedagogies of Difference and Practices of Listening in The House of Mirth and Passing

Bromell, N. — 2009-05-19

Bromell's essay argues that Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Nella Larsen's Passing both represent and enact a core problem in theories of deliberative democracy: how to assess the value of differences among citizens (of race, gender, or age) when democracy is understood primarily in terms of its communicative practices. On the one hand, a deliberative democracy would appear to need some minimal "common standards" of what constitutes reasoned communication. On the other, it also seeks to allow as much genuine difference to enter into democratic deliberations as possible. What exactly does it mean for democratic citizens to communicate successfully? How should they understand the act of communication with an "Other" who is different, and how should they understand what it means to "know" this Other?

These questions animate both novels. The House of Mirth is concerned with gender difference primarily and Passing mainly with racial difference, but both are careful also to situate these differences within an explicitly acknowledged range of other differences, including those of class and sexuality. These novels depict the failed and successful communicative strategies adopted by their characters as they encounter others who are "different" and struggle to "know" and communicate with them. Both novels go beyond merely representing the problem of knowing and communicating difference to deploy sophisticated narrative methods that and pull their readers into this problem, requiring us to employ and test various strategies ourselves. They thereby offer a democratic pedagogy that encourages readers to understand that knowing an "Other" means acknowledging also that we can never completely know and fix the meaning of difference.

CUT!... Flannery O'Connor's Apotemnophiliac Allegories

Evans, D. H. — 2009-05-19

Grotesque or damaged bodies play a central role in a number of Flannery O'Connor's most powerful stories. One route for interpreting their significance is to approach them by way of a rare psychological condition that has been named apotemnophilia. Apotemnophiliacs experience an overwhelming desire to amputate one of more of their perfectly healthy limbs. Among the things that make the condition particularly mysterious is the challenge it offers to our standard conception of what constitutes a "whole" body. Two of O'Connor's most celebrated stories, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "Good Country People," have at their center amputated bodies, those of Tom T. Shiftlet and Hulga Hopewell respectively. Evans argues that those incomplete bodies are intended to contest the notion of "wholeness" as a spiritual or existential ideal. On the contrary, O'Connor's stories drive her characters towards a necessary recognition of their incompleteness. Finally, the allegorical form of O'Connor's fiction itself constitutes a parallel to the amputated and imperfect condition of the bodies that inhabit them. Just as the bodies point insistently to their own incompleteness, so the stories advertise their own inadequacy, forcing upon the reader a kind of hermeneutic phantom pain, an importunate demand for interpretation that can, however, never be fully satisfied.

Marking Time in Native America: Haiku, Elegy, Survival

Ford, K. J. — 2009-05-19

Ford's essay investigates the post–World War II haiku boom in the United States with particular attention to how haiku has served different projects of national identity. These diverse projects share an inclination to respond in haiku to the United States' troubled history of colonization and conquest, associating Native America and Japan in a number of ways and generating poems that address the conquest of the Americas with surprising consistency. Japanese Americans writing from internment camps during World War II (Violet Matsuda de Cristoforo) associated their own removal and oppression with that of Native Americans. Anglo-American poets sometimes turned to haiku (after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the wars with Korea and Vietnam) to escape an identity they scorned: white, American, middle-class. Haiku's famed impersonality promised a release not merely from Western egocentrism but from Western identity—and the guilt associated with that identity. To these poets (Ordway Southard, Foster and Rhoda Jewell, Jack Kerouak, Diane Di Prima, Gary Snyder) haiku both thematized and formalized transience and was thus precisely the poetic form for explaining conquest and elegizing the Vanishing American, who, in the national imaginary, vanished into haiku's province: nature. And yet Native American poets (Gerald Vizenor, William Oandasan) have also written haiku for precisely the opposite reason: for resistance and survival. What we discover in the varied uses of haiku among Japanese, Anglo-, and Native Americans is its surprising utility as a form, supposed to suppress self-identification, for competing projects of American national identity.

Ghosts of Essentialism: Racial Memory as Epistemological Claim

Su, J. J. — 2009-05-19

Su calls for a reexamination of essentialism in light of a resurging interest in identity and identity politics. Since the mid-1990s, poststructuralist dismissals of identity as "pernicious and metaphysically inaccurate" have increasingly been challenged by feminist philosophers and cultural critics, race theorists, and, most recently, "postpositivist realists." Yet academic scholarship continues to read essentialism in ontological terms, as Walter Benn Michaels does. Ontological readings focus attention on the ways in which essentialism involves positing a presocial being who is defined by an essence that predetermines an individual's identity in racial terms. Su proposes to shift the way essentialism is analyzed, to consider it in epistemological rather than ontological terms. This would involve focusing on the extent to which racial memory in these texts enables, prohibits, or otherwise transforms cultural knowledge. Through a close analysis of works by Frank Chin and N. Scott Momaday, Su argues that essentialism does not necessarily imply the existence of static identities or common experiences that define a people; rather, it implies the possibility for certain personal experiences to yield reliable knowledge about broader social patterns of exploitation.

Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship; Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson's Early American Women; The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System

Gould, P. — 2009-05-19

Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature; The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Osucha, E. — 2009-05-19

Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist; Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics

Homestead, M. J. — 2009-05-19

American Transcendentalism: A History; Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman; William Cullen Bryant: Author of America; Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples

Stacy, J. — 2009-05-19

The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo; Race, Theft, and Ethics: Property Matters in African American Literature; Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading

Nowlin, M. — 2009-05-19

From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives; Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative; Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery Since "Gone with the Wind."

Belasco, S. — 2009-05-19

American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945; Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930

Robertson, M. — 2009-05-19

The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U.S. Culture; The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary

Lopez, M. — 2009-05-19

Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life; Intimacies; The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

Coviello, P. — 2009-05-19

A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II; Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941

Hummer, T. — 2009-05-19

I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South; Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

Ernest, J. — 2009-05-19

Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem; Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School

Rosenbaum, S. — 2009-05-19

The Spaces of Violence; The Economics of Fantasy: Rape in Twentieth-Century Literature

Fulk, M. — 2009-05-19

Beyond Literary Chinatown; The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene

So, C. — 2009-05-19

Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction; Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land

Balaev, M. — 2009-05-19

Other

2009-05-19

Other

2009-05-19

Introduction

Rusert, B., Wald, P. — 2009-02-13

"Freedom with a Vengeance": Choosing Kin in Antislavery Literature and Law

Wong, E. — 2009-02-13

Wong's essay charts the legal controversies over slaves brought into New England after Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw's forceful application of the celebrated British civil suit, Somerset v. Stewart (1772), in the landmark case of the slave girl Med, or Commonwealth v. Aves (1836). It explores material that has been largely left out of the antislavery story: the cases brought by abolitionists to free slaves who had traveled with their masters into free territory. Wong's essay reconstructs the records of these cases from popular literature, newsprint, and legal pamphlets to explore what recent literary and historical scholarship has largely overlooked. Harriet and John S. Jacobs, Maria Weston Chapman, Sojourner Truth, and Ellis Gray Loring appear alongside a number of largely unknown slave attendants in an essay that explores the complex ways legal discourses circulating in newsprint constituted the agency and subjectivity of slaves who petitioned Northern courts for freedom (in counterdistinction from the criminal will of the fugitive). Their cases reveal the contradictory logic by which abolitionists disregarded the slaves' express desires to remain with their masters, and in many cases argued for the very sorts of separations from kin that usually figured so largely in abolitionist attacks on slavery. These legal stories compose a loose genre of antislavery literature, charting the struggles of jurists, slaveholders, free blacks, and abolitionists as they negotiated the predicament of a territorially bounded freedom.

Salvaging Legal Personhood: Melville's Benito Cereno

DeLombard, J. M. — 2009-02-13

DeLombard's essay departs from previous legally oriented readings of Benito Cereno by foregrounding not the title character's mysterious deposition but the novella's hitherto neglected series of contracts in order to interpret Herman Melville's only sustained literary portrayal of slavery through contemporaneous changes in contract law. Surveying the numerous legal documents that accumulate within and between the novella and its source text, Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), the essay compares contracts and testimony to demonstrate how, instead of corroborating the legal personhood of their agents, these amassed textual assertions of civil agency cumulatively deauthorize text and author alike. The insistent temporality of law (and with it, narrative) ensures that, rather than affirming autonomous selfhood, such legal and extralegal acts of testifying and contract making document its absence.

Interracial Sexual Abuse and Legal Subjectivity in Antebellum Law and Literature

Stone, A. — 2009-02-13

Representations of the sexual abuse of enslaved women merit a specificity of analysis that has so far eluded scholars of American literature and culture. The definition of legal character in this context calls for further study. Stone addresses the peculiar legal conundrum in which enslaved women found themselves when suffering the abuse of slaveholders. These women's shifting legal subject-positions posed theoretical problems within this particular power relationship, as the boundary distinguishing the law's treatment of slaves as property and persons blurred. An enslaved woman's admittedly slender potential civil protection as property was eroded when her abuser was simultaneously her owner. This shift in her protections produced a rift in her legal subjectivity through which systems of terror could operate legitimately. Stone closely examines Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1865) in conjunction with the 1855 trial of Celia, an executed murderous slave, to compare specific literary and legal interpretations of North Carolina and Missouri slave law against a more general understanding of slaves' legal "double character" to argue that both women, through criminal acts, negotiated legal and literary conventions in their pursuit of legal subjectivity. Comparing a legal case and a literary text extends scholarship on literary treatments of antebellum crime to determine how both women challenged early American legal and cultural understandings of black criminality.

Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology

Blackwood, S. — 2009-02-13

This essay expands the vital but limited critical focus on the importance (practical and thematic) of textual literacy in slave narratives and other writings that appeared in the African American press in order to apprehend more clearly how these writers, working with words during a profoundly visual cultural moment, argued for a visual literacy that both denied the indexical power of white visual practices and embraced the power of the image to make injustice visible. Blackwood's analysis focuses on how texts by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs explore the representational capacity of a variety of prephotographic visual technologies, including portraiture, woodcuts, stereotypes, and the camera obscura. Douglass and Jacobs lived in the midst of a photographic revolution. Douglass repeatedly commented on photographic technology and celebrated its democratic potential. But both writers also devoted sustained attention in their texts to pre- or nonphotographic forms of visual representation. In so doing, they articulate a major, yet understudied, argument about the intersections between visual and textual representation during the period. In letters, editorials, and slave narratives, Douglass and Jacobs dramatize the interplay between the objective and illusionist potential of visual technologies. By embracing and remaining skeptical of the truthful qualities of the photographic image, the fugitive notice, and the slave narrative itself, Douglass and Jacobs enact a complicated form of resistance that alters our understandings of antebellum African American aesthetic production and the history of nineteenth-century visual culture more generally.

Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave"

Newman, L. — 2009-02-13

In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass set out to nurture emergent antislavery commitments within the most advanced political milieu of the antebellum decade, the Free Soil movement. Douglass developed a protoenvironmentalist critique of capitalism's alienation of workers from the land, arguing that liberty achieved its truest expression when free people mixed their labor with nature in the pursuit of self-reliance. Democratic access to arable land was a precondition of real emancipation, which required reversing capitalism's expropriation of the commons. Douglass fictionalized these ideas in his only novella, "The Heroic Slave" (1853), in which Madison Washington, leader of the 1841 Creole mutiny, declares his independence in a forest glade that functions as a chapel of natural rights. This kind of radical republican pastoralism also shapes My Bondage, My Freedom (1855). The trope's polemical function is especially apparent when it is contrasted retrospectively with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), in which nature is a paralyzing wilderness rather than a theater of self-emancipation. Ecocriticism has failed so far to engage substantially with black cultures of nature. Part of the problem may be that the lithified historical experience of slavery in rural settings has prevented black writers from developing ecocentric ways of thinking. Douglass's integration of radical pastoralism into abolitionist rhetoric is not only a spotlight example of an alternative black tradition and experience of nature, it also showcases the organic connection between the struggles for social and environmental justice.

"Be Cautious of the Word `Rebel'": Race, Revolution, and Transnational History in Martin Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America

Doolen, A. — 2009-02-13

Doolen examines the interrelationship between transnationalist ideology and the African American experience in Martin Delany's novel Blake; or, The Huts of America. In the antebellum struggle against slavery and racism, abolitionists considered fiction less effective than more factual narrative forms. However, Doolen argues that Martin Delany uses the novel form to identify how the fictions of white supremacy established the terms and categories of U.S. historiography. Recognizing that white-authored histories helped maintain the institutions of slavery, Delany attempts to remove African Americans from a nationalist discourse that automatically referred their appeals for racial justice back to a failed white revolutionary project. Doolen argues that the transnational shift that structures Blake—a movement between the United States and Cuba—constituted Delany's rejection of American Revolutionary time and space. By the time of the novel's abrupt ending, Delany had developed a hemispheric context for black liberation that cannot be traced back to the eighteenth-century corruptions of American republicanism. Finally, Doolen makes a case for Blake's literary complexity by emphasizing the nuanced relationship between novelistic and historical writing. In the process, Doolen challenges the standard chronology of African American literary history in which abolitionism's political, rhetorical, and formulaic constraints supposedly hindered the development of a fictional tradition prior to Emancipation.

Nation, Ocean, Hemisphere, and Planet: New Geographies of American Literary Studies

Murphy, G. — 2009-02-13

Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America; Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy; Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History; Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History

Stein, J. A. — 2009-02-13

Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century; One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic; A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America

Grimstad, P. — 2009-02-13

The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954; What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America; Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel

Aldama, F. L. — 2009-02-13

Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World; Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960

Beidler, P. — 2009-02-13

Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism; Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology; Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta

Jenkins, C. M. — 2009-02-13

National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature; Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America; Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism; Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity

Love, H. — 2009-02-13

Brief Mention

2009-02-13

In Memoriam: Carol Rigsby

2009-02-13

Sati in Philadelphia: The Widow(s) of Malabar

Richards, J. H. — 2008-11-17

David Humphreys's 1790 play, The Widow of Malabar, has been little studied, but it demonstrates surprising complexity as a cultural artifact of the American new republic. Written as a close adaptation of Antoine-Marin Lemierre's La Veuve du Malabar (1770), Humphreys's version appeared in Philadelphia and New York as a vehicle of American social liberality toward women, developing a theme barely visible in Lemierre, and as the rare product of an American author on a U.S. stage otherwise dominated by British dramas and actors. Replaced in U.S. theaters by Marianna Starke's British version of the same French source, the old Widow made way for an adaptation radically different from Humphreys's close translation. Starke's drama on the Philadelphia stage represents a turn away from French ideas and characters and toward a reconception of the early republic as a nation culturally dependent upon Great Britain. In addition, sati itself becomes a dynamic theatrical sign of a variety of local and international concerns connected to Asian Indians, Native Americans, and the place of the United States in global politics and culture. It reflects, among other things, both American awareness of events and manners on the subcontinent and its confusions over its own Indians. In the end, sati in Philadelphia is not merely an exotic displacement but a domestic site for sometimes contradictory national self-conceptions.

Documenting Tradition: Territoriality and Textuality in Black Hawk's Narrative

Rifkin, M. — 2008-11-17

In the spring of 1832, a well-respected Sauk warrior named Black Hawk led a group of Sauks, Foxes, Kickapoos, and Potawatomies across the Mississippi River, through lands formerly occupied by the Sauks. Characterized as an assault on white settlements by U.S. officials during and afterwards, the movements of Black Hawk's band were represented as a direct threat to the safety of the American public and a violation of existing treaties. In contrast, Black Hawk's Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk (1833) offers a genealogy of the conflict that contextualizes it within a decades-long struggle between the United States and the Sauks, as well as other native peoples in the western Great Lakes region, over how to conceptualize native landholding, diplomacy, and trade. The narrative explores the effects of reducing a complex regional matrix to a series of treaty-mediated relationships between individual tribes and the federal government, insisting on the existence of an alternative native-centered framework through which to understand occupancy and exchange. While it is the result of a layered composition involving transcription, translation, and editing, Black Hawk's Life functions as a self-consciously traditionalist critique of the mappings and subjectivities of U.S. Indian policy. The text uses the medium of print to provide a countervailing narrative to the texts of the treaty-system, sketching a set of regional native processes, practices, and principles which have no place either in the atomizing political geography of Indian policy or the hybridized critical imaginary of the "middle ground."

That Damned Mob of Scribbling Siblings: The American Romance as Anti-novel in The Power of Sympathy and Pierre

Dill, E. — 2008-11-17

In "That Damned Mob of Scribbling Siblings: The American Romance as Anti-Novel in The Power of Sympathy and Pierre," Elizabeth Dill discusses the eruption of genre chaos in early and mid-nineteenth century American works of fiction. In order to do so, she considers the connections between two much-disputed incest romances, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Herman Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). Dill's interpretations show how both books refuse to fit into any genre category. The romantic yearnings of the sibling lovers in both books, Dill suggests, constitute a radical love that requires a radical language, so radical, in fact, that silence is often portrayed as the most rebellious of all forms of communication. In her readings of the two texts, then, Dill analyzes how silence in aberrant scenes of romance articulates an unspoken and unspeakable language of love. Dill thus presents the silences of these texts as revolutionary spaces. Within those spaces, Brown and Melville locate an erosion of certainty that the texts posit as an American ideal.

"The Best of Me Is There": Emerson as Lecturer and Celebrity

Carr O'Neill, B. — 2008-11-17

By definition, celebrities exist in public as an association of physical traits or projected values. Celebrity was problematic for Emerson in three areas. First, celebrity heightened Emerson's anxieties about his friendships and intimate relationships. Emerson's relative comfort in the public arena of the lecture hall, as compared with the private arena of intimate relationships, carries mixed results when attention to his body rather than his ideas becomes the focus of his success. Second, celebrity accentuates the tension between interest in public persons and the social conformity that Emerson consistently urges his readers to shun. Third, celebrity's attention to the physical person leads to misinterpretations of Emerson's lectures. From the first generation of Emerson's biographers forward, critics have disparaged contemporary audiences as insensitive to the complexities of his lectures. This essay, however, considers the possible uses of the celebrity for the culture that both created and mistook him. Viewed in the light of Emerson's celebrity, misinterpretation of his lectures reveals his audiences' appreciation for intellectual accomplishment and their desire for the spiritual uplift brought by physical proximity to "genius." In addition, because Emerson's celebrity encouraged a range of interpretations of his cultural relevance, it required individuals to examine Emerson's reputation for themselves, and it thereby fostered the kind of self-reliant thinking that Emerson himself advocated. Emerson's case reveals that, in an age of mass culture, the ability to interpret celebrities' significance is a key to critical thinking and a valuable form of literacy.

The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes's End of a Primitive Sounds the Limits of Midcentury Racial Liberalism

Melamed, J. — 2008-11-17

"The Killing Joke of Sympathy" reconstructs the centrality of the "race novel" for the consolidation of racial liberalism as an official and limited state of antiracism in the United States after World War II. In particular, it considers the evidentiary and emotional values ascribed to literature by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, arguably the most influential philanthropy at mid-century dedicated to race relations. For the fund, literature was a privileged tool for antiracist social transformation because of its unique capability to arouse white sympathies. Jodi Melamed argues that such ideas shaped a dominant practice of reading that had a regulative effect, narrowing what counted as acceptable antiracism.

Melamed reads Chester Himes's End of a Primitive as a novel where we see satire deliberately misfired in an attempt to dehegemonize racial liberal meanings secured through the discourse of "the race novel." Featuring the murder of a white, female race relations professional by an African American author resembling Himes, End of a Primitive "predicts" (through metafictional address) that the force of racial liberal reading practices will cause the novel to be misread by white liberal readers as protest, rather than satire. At the same time, the novel constructs an imaginative exercise that dares readers to go against the grain of such reading practices, to experience the novel's humor, and to "get the handle to the joke" of their own confinement. For the reader who fails the imaginative exercise, End of a Primitive nonetheless debunks liberal ideas of sympathy as a guarantee of racial progress.

Science, Nature Work, and the Kinaesthetic Body in Cather and Stein

Raine, A. — 2008-11-17

This essay reads Stein and Cather's early autobiographical fictions as part of a complex negotiation of the gendered divide between the professionalizing sciences and the feminized field of "nature work." Intrigued yet unsatisfied by scientific accounts of human consciousness as biological process, and wary of entanglement in popular associations of women's nature work with maternal sentiment and feminine virtue, Stein and Cather sought to modernize their "feel for mother earth" by rewriting it in unsentimental and authoritatively modern terms. To that end, both writers adapted notions of rhythm and kinaesthetic performance that originated in the new sciences of psychology and anthropology and were popularized by artists and intellectuals such as Isadora Duncan and Mary Austin. Using Duncan and the opera singer Olive Fremstad as models, Stein and Cather developed rhythmic conceptions of artistic production that sought to reconcile the modern scientific view of human interiority with a modernist celebration of human creative agency, and at the same time to distance themselves from women's nature work while continuing the nature worker's task of drawing attention to the vital continuity between human and nonhuman nature. Read in this light, their work reveals a shared and gendered ambivalence about science and nature that in many ways anticipates our own.

The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England; Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era

West, P. — 2008-11-17

Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature; The Transcendentalists

Carafiol, P. — 2008-11-17

The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives; Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity; "Whole Oceans Away": Melville and the Pacific

Egan, H. — 2008-11-17

Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858; American Architects and Their Books, 1840-1915

Rusert, B. — 2008-11-17

Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race and Reform; E Pluribus Unum: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Constitutional Paradox

Miles, J. D. — 2008-11-17

Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice; "Good Observers of Nature": American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885

Lundblad, M. — 2008-11-17

Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century; Telling Narratives: Secrets in African American Literature; Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama

Baker, C. R. — 2008-11-17

Reading Network Fiction; This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature

Jagoda, P. — 2008-11-17

Call for Papers: Rudolph Fisher, Luminary of the Harlem Renaissance

2008-11-17

Call for Papers: Emily Dickinson's Reading

2008-11-17