Egan: Oriental Shadows

Oriental Shadows

The Presence of the East in Early American Literature

Jim Egan

Through the use of several iconic early American authors (Anne Bradstreet, James Kirkpatrick, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe), James Egan’s Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature explores the presence of “the East” in American writing.

The specter of the East haunted the literature of colonial British America and the new United States, from the earliest promotional pamphlets to the most aesthetically sophisticated works of art of the American Renaissance. Figures of Persia, China, Arabia, and other Oriental people, places, and things played crucial roles in many British American literary works, serving as key images in early American writers’ efforts to demonstrate that early American culture could match—and perhaps even surpass—European standards of refinement. These writers offered the East as a solution to America’s perceived inferior civilized status by suggesting that America become more civilized not by becoming more European but instead by adopting aesthetic styles and standards long associated with an East cast as superior aesthetically to both America and Europe.

In bringing to light this largely overlooked archive of images within the American literary canon, Oriental Shadows suggests that the East played a key role in the emergence of a distinctively American literary tradition and, further, that early American identity was born as much from figures of the East as it was from the colonists’ encounters with the frontier.

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Stewart: Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America

Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America

David M. Stewart

Historians of workingmen in the antebellum United States have long been preoccupied with labor politics and with the racism, nativism, and misogyny of their public culture. Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America expands our account of such men by asking questions about their social and bodily lives that are more discrete, yet still engaged with the economic forces that radically altered working life as the market revolution transformed a rural, agricultural nation into one that was commercial, industrial, and urban.

To advance a more capacious view of workingmen, David M. Stewart turns to reading, which is where many first encountered antebellum change as a material fact. Tapping sources from serial fiction, reform tracts, and children’s books, to diet, land use policy, and personal correspondence, Stewart contends that in helping retool a workforce of farmers and artisans to meet the disciplinary needs of capital, the period’s burgeoning new print culture industry developed rhetoric that used emotional coercion to affect conduct. This rhetoric also became the basis for recreational idioms that compensated for the pain of both coercive reading itself and the world such reading produced. In the space between the disciplinary and recreational lives of workingmen, Reading and Disorder revises how we understand them as performative subjects, which is to say, as cause and effect of changing antebellum times.

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Woodson: Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants

Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants

Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s

Jon Woodson

In the 1930s African Americans faced three distinct historical crises that impacted the lives of African Americans directly—the Great Depression, the existential-identity crisis, and the Italo-Ethiopian War, with its threat of a race war. A sizeable body of black poetry was produced in this decade, which captured the new modes of autonomy through which black Americans resisted these social calamities. Much of it, however, including the most influential protest poems, was dismissed as “romantic” by major, leftist critics and anthologists.

Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s, by Jon Woodson, uses social philology to unveil social discourse, self fashioning, and debates in poems gathered from anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and individual collections. The first chapter examines three long poems, finding overarching jeremiadic discourse that inaugurated a militant, politically aware agent. Chapter two examines self-fashioning in the numerous sonnets that responded to the new media of radio, newsreels, movies, and photo-magazines. The third chapter shows how new subjectivities were generated by poetry addressed to the threat of race war in which the white race was exterminated.

The black intellectuals who dominated the interpretative discourses of the 1930s fostered exteriority, while black culture as a whole plunged into interiority. Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants delineates the struggle between these inner and outer worlds, a study made difficult by a contemporary intellectual culture which recoils from a belief in a consistent, integrated self.

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González: The Troubled Union

The Troubled Union

Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels

John Morán González

In The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, John Morán González traces the imperialist imaginings behind literary efforts to reunite the United States after the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This innovative study explores how the U.S. historical romance attempted to rebuild a national identity by renovating Manifest Destiny for the twentieth-century imperialist future through courtship and marriage plots. Yet even as these literary romances promised expansive national futures, the racial and gender contradictions of U.S. democracy threatened to result in troubled unions at home and fractious ventures abroad. Canonical authors such as Henry James, popular authors such as Helen Hunt Jackson, and rediscovered authors such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton provide the dramatic narratives examined in this book.

Employing theoretical perspectives drawn from American Studies and Latin American Studies, González highlights the importance of the “domestic”—understood as both the domestic boundaries of the nation and of the home—as a key site within civil society that maintained and renewed imperialist national subjectivities. The Troubled Union combines the formal analysis of literary genre with interdisciplinary cultural studies to elucidate just how the imperial national allegory deeply structured the U.S. cultural imagination of the late nineteenth century.

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Levy-Navarro, ed.: Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture

Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture

Edited by Elena Levy-Navarro

Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture, edited by Elena Levy-Navarro, is the first collection of essays to offer a historical consideration of fat bodies in Anglophone culture. The interdisciplinary essays cover periods from the medieval to the contemporary, mapping out a new terrain for historical consideration. These essays question many of the commonplace assumptions that circulate around the category of fat: that fat exists as a natural and transhistorical category; that a premodern period existed which universally celebrated fat and knew no fatphobia; and that the thin, youthful body, as the presumptively beautiful and healthy one, should be the norm by which to judge other bodies.

The essays begin with a consideration of the interrelationship between the rise of weight-watching and the rise of the novel. The essays that follow consider such wide-ranging figures as the fat child’s body as a contested site in post-Blair U.K. and in Lord of the Flies; H. G. Wells; Wilkie Collins’s subversively performative Fosco; Ben Jonson; the voluptuous Lillian Russell; Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; the opera diva; and the fat feminist activists of recent San Francisco. In developing their histories in a self-conscious way that addresses the pervasive fatphobia of the present-day Anglophone culture, Historicizing Fat suggests ways in which scholarship and criticism in the humanities can address, resist, and counteract the assumptions of late modern culture.

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Wilson: Learning to Live with Crime

Learning to Live with Crime

American Crime Narrative in the Neoconservative Turn

Christopher P. Wilson

Since the mid-1960s, the war on crime has reshaped public attitudes about state authority, criminal behavior, and the responsibilities of citizenship. But how have American writers grappled with these changes? What happens when a journalist approaches the workings of organized crime not through its legendary Godfathers but through a workaday, low-level figure who informs on his mob? Why is it that interrogation scenes have become so central to prime-time police dramas of late? What is behind writers’ recent fascination with “cold case” homicides, with private security, or with prisons?

In Learning to Live with Crime, Christopher P. Wilson examines this war on crime and how it has made its way into cultural representation and public consciousness. Under the sway of neoconservative approaches to criminal justice and public safety, Americans have been urged to see crime as an inevitable risk of modern living and to accept ever more aggressive approaches to policing, private security, and punishment. The idea has been not simply to fight crime but to manage its risks; to inculcate personal vigilance in citizens; and to incorporate criminals’ knowledge through informants and intelligence gathering. At its most scandalous, this study suggests, contemporary law enforcement has even come to mimic crime’s own operations.

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Orr: Darkly Perfect World

Darkly Perfect World

Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir

Stanley Orr

Stanley Orr’s Darkly Perfect World offers a large-scale historical narrative about the way American crime fiction and film have changed throughout the twentieth century. Orr argues that films noirs and noir fictions dramatize Raymond Chandler’s pronouncement that “Even in death, a man has a right to his own identity.” Orr illuminates a noir ethos committed to “authenticating alienation”: subjectivity managed through radical polarization of Self and Other. Distinguishing a heretofore unrecognized context for American noir, Orr demonstrates that Chandler and Dashiell Hammett arrive at this subject within and against the colonial adventure genre. While the renegades of Joseph Conrad and Louis Becke project a figure vulnerable to shifts in cultural context, the noir protagonist exemplifies alienated selfhood and often performs a “continental operation” against the slippages of the colonial adventurer. But even as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and other noir virtuosi persist with this revision of late Victorian adventure, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes, and John Okada experiment with hard-boiled alienation for a subversion of noir that resonates throughout literary postmodernism. In their respective avant-garde novels, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Paul Auster expose what K.W. Jeter terms the “darkly perfect world” of noir, thus giving rise to and enabling the con men and “connected guys” of contemporary films noirs such as Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, David Fincher’s Seven, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

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Pelizzon and West: Tabloid, Inc.

Tabloid, Inc.

Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives

V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West

Tabloid, Inc. provides the first extended study of the rich exchange between New York’s tabloid press and other narrative frames, including Hollywood crime film, museum exhibits, and hard-boiled fiction. Armed with hard-to-find early issues of the New York Daily News, the New York Daily Mirror, and the Evening Graphic, V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West trace crime stories from the late 1920s through the 1940s across often-contentious borders between different narrative sites.

Rather than dismissing the early tabloids as fodder for “gutter vamps and backyard sheiks,” as one critic called them, the authors treat these papers as distinctive literary venues typified by extreme flexibility in storytelling. The papers’ historically denigrated social status prompts the authors to study what they call “narrative mobility”—the process by which a story, in transiting from one medium, genre, or mode to another, reveals the underlying class boundaries that circumscribe that movement.

Combining narrative theory with cultural, literary, and film studies, Tabloid, Inc. marshals a wealth of little-seen archival material that includes not only the pages of the tabloids themselves but also Hollywood press books, studio correspondence, and fabulous though now-forgotten movies.

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Berthold: American Risorgimento

American Risorgimento

Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy

Dennis Berthold

Although Herman Melville is typically considered one of America’s earliest cosmopolitan writers, scholarship has focused primarily on his involvement with the South Seas, England, and the Holy Land. In American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy, Dennis Berthold extends Melville’s transnational vision both geographically and historically by examining his many references to Italy and Rome in the context of the Risorgimento, Italy’s long quest for independence and political unity.

Melville’s contemporaries, notably Margaret Fuller and Henry T. Tuckerman, recognized the similarities between the Risorgimento and America’s struggle for national identity, and the influx of exiles from the failed Italian revolutions of 1820 and 1831 made Melville’s New York a hotbed of Risorgimento sympathies. Literary and political expostulations on Italy’s plight combined to create a distinctively American view of the Risorgimento that Melville elaborated in his fiction through allusions, characterizations, and direct commentary on Roman history, Dante, Machiavelli, Pope Pius IX, and Giuseppe Mazzini.

Melville followed the unfolding drama of Italian nationalism more closely than any other major American writer and found in it tropes and themes that fueled his turn to poetry, particularly after his visit to Italy in 1857. The Civil War, a crisis for American nationalism as urgent and profound as the Risorgimento, reinforced the symbolic parallels between the United States and Italy and led Melville to meditate on Giuseppe Garibaldi and other Italian patriots in one of his longest poems.

Melville’s literary appropriations of Italian history, art, and politics demonstrate that transnational cultural exchanges are not confined to later American writing but originate with the country’s earliest authors and their recognition that any national literature worthy of the name must incorporate a broad international frame of reference.

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O’Hara: Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading

Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading

Daniel T. O’Hara

The forces of globalization have transformed literary studies in America, and not for the better. The detailed critical reading of artistic texts has been replaced by newly minted catchphrases describing widely divergent snippets and anecdotes—deemed mere documents—regardless of the critic’s expertise in the appropriate languages and cultures. Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading by Daniel T. O’Hara traces the origin of this global approach to Emerson. But it also demonstrates another, tragic tradition of vision from Henry James that counters the Emersonian global imagination with the hard realities of being human. Building on this tradition, on Lacan’s insights into the real, and on Badiou’s original theory of truth, O’Hara points to how we can, and should, reground literary study in critical reading.

In Emerson’s classic essay “Experience” (1844), America appears in and as a symptom of the critic’s self-making that sacrifices the power of love to this visionary project—a literary version of the American self-made man. O’Hara rescues critical reading using James’s late work, especially The Golden Bowl (1904), and builds on this vision with examinations of texts by St. Paul, Emerson, Wallace Stevens, James Purdy, John Cheever, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, and others.

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Anthony: Paper Money Men

Paper Money Men

Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America

David Anthony

Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America by David Anthony outlines the emergence of a “sensational public sphere” in antebellum America. It argues that this new representational space reflected and helped shape the intricate relationship between commerce and masculine sensibility in a period of dramatic economic upheaval. Looking at a variety of sensational media—from penny press newspapers and pulpy dime novels to the work of well-known writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville—this book counters the common critical notion that the period’s sensationalism addressed a primarily working-class audience. Instead, Paper Money Menshows how a wide variety of sensational media was in fact aimed principally at an emergent class of young professional men. “Paper money men” were caught in the transition from an older and more stable mercantilist economy to a panic-prone economic system centered on credit and speculation. And, Anthony argues, they found themselves reflected in the sensational public sphere, a fantasy space in which new models of professional manhood were repeatedly staged and negotiated. Compensatory in nature, these alternative models of manhood rejected fiscal security and property as markers of a stable selfhood, looking instead toward intangible factors such as emotion and race in an effort to forge a secure sense of manhood in an age of intense uncertainty.

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Goodwin: Modern American Grotesque

Modern American Grotesque

Literature and Photography

James Goodwin

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O’Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century.

A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin’s book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

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Seniors: Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing

Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing

The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater

Paula Marie Seniors

Paula Marie Seniors’s Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing is an engaging and well-researched book that explores the realities of African American life and history as refracted through the musical theater productions of one of the most prolific black song-writing teams of the early twentieth century. James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Bob Cole combined conservative and progressive ideas in a complex and historically specific strategy for overcoming racism and its effects. In Shoo Fly Regiment (1906–1908) and The Red Moon (1908–1910), theater, uplift, and politics collided as the team tried to communicate a politics of uplift, racial pride, gender equality, and interethnic coalitions. The overarching question of this study is how roles and representations in black musical theater both reflected and challenged the dominant social order. While some scholars dismiss the team as conformists, Seniors’s contention is that they used the very tools of hegemony to make progressive political statements and to create a distinctly black theater informed by black politics, history, and culture. These men were writers, musicians, actors, and vaudevillians who strove to change the perception of African Americans on stage from one of minstrelsy buffoonery to one of dignity and professionalism.

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Richards: Distancing English

Distancing English

A Chapter in the History of the Inexpressible

Page Richards

How did fears of cultural inadequacy play out in the English language after American independence and the War of 1812? Like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, essayist Walter Channing suggests that the country’s perceived deficiency in literature is due to a crucial overlap with England, that is, having “the same language with a nation, totally unlike it in almost every relation.” In Distancing English, Page Richards shows how these concerns of language are historically interwoven with the inexpressible.

Often overlooked, the topos of the inexpressible redirects the ventriloquism of the English language. From its beginning, this topos combines the hyperbole of high expectations with the failure of inadequate words. In Charles Brockden Brown or George Tucker, it can register deficiency of “character” on and off the page, establishing important strategies of decenteredness also associated with modernism.

In writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and John Berryman, the inexpressible seizes advantage from disadvantage. It runs through literary framing strategies and flexible shaggy dog humor. The 1855 preface to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass remaps the topos and emerges as a major movement in the history of the inexpressible.

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Milder and Fuller, eds.: The Buisness of Reflection

The Business of Reflection

Hawthorne in His Notebooks

Edited by Robert Milder and Randall Fuller

The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks is a scholarly, annotated selection of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Notebooks, English Notebooks, and French and Italian Notebooks culled from the authoritative Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Ohio State University Press, 23 volumes) and intended both for students and teachers of American literature and for general readers.

The American Notebooks (1835–53) cover the period of most of Hawthorne’s published writing and are crucial background for the genesis of his fiction, for his psychological and vocational development, for his marriage to Sophia Peabody, and for his relationships with contemporaries such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. The English Notebooks (1853–60) record his experiences and impressions during his residence in England, among them his incisive and influential sketch of Herman Melville. The French and Italian Notebooks (1858–59) are a sourcebook for Hawthorne’s last published romance, The Marble Faun, and, as Henry James observed, for his deeply ambivalent response to the aesthetic and historical legacy of European civilization.

Taken together, Hawthorne’s notebooks are essential materials for studying Hawthorne as a writer and a man. They present him at his most candid, intimate, and robust—a many-sided figure who complements and revises the persona known from his published writings, often in unexpected ways.

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MacKenzie: The Theatre of the Real

The Theatre of the Real

Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Gina Masucci MacKenzie

The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie’s work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self.

The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats’s “dancer” plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett’s universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim’s postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism’s tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.

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Miller: Makover Nation

Makeover Nation

The United States of Reinvention

Toby Miller

Life is very much a project in the United States—but not a straightforwardly individual one. A duality of individual free choice and disciplinary institutional governance is the grand national paradox. Simply being—leading life without a bumper sticker avowing one’s elective institutional affinities—seems implausible in a country consumed by the makeover—the idea that what you were born as need not define you forever.

As Toby Miller writes in his introduction: “I come neither to bury the makeover nor to praise the makeover, but to criticize it, even as I stand alternately bewildered, amused, appalled, and attracted by it.” In Makeover Nation he does just that in a witty, no-holds-barred style. Miller looks at the power of various forms of knowledge about people and their emotions as they have been applied to the US population, from talk therapy to drug treatment. He is particularly interested in young people—in examining how childhood is constructed—and pays close attention to the much-favored (and overused) diagnosis and treatment of ADHD/ADD. He also focuses his attention on metrosexuals and right-wing Christians to disclose how these opposing groups manifest their drive toward self-creation. Miller believes that we must question the pleasures of reinvention even as we embrace them.

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Mooney: The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality

The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality

Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth Century Novel

Susan Mooney

In The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Susan Mooney extensively examines four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content—Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. She shows how motifs of censorship, with all its restrictions, pressures, rules, judgments, and forms of negation, became artistically embedded in the novels’ plots, characters, settings, tropes, and themes. These novels contest censorship’s status quo and critically explore its processes and power. This study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, particularly in relation to the twentieth century’s growing interest in sexuality and its discourses.

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Carpenter: Seeing Red

Seeing Red

Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians

Cari M. Carpenter

In Seeing Red, Cari M. Carpenter examines anger in the poetry and prose of three early American Indian writers: S. Alice Callahan, Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca. In articulating a legitimate anger in the late nineteenth century, the first published indigenous women writers were met not only with stereotypes of “savage” rage but with social proscriptions against female anger. While the loss of land, life, and cultural traditions is central to the Native American literature of the period, this dispossession is only one side of the story. Its counterpart, indigenous claims to that which is threatened, is just as essential to these narratives. The first published American Indian women writers used a variety of tactics to protest such dispossession. Seeing Red argues that one of the most pervasive and intriguing of these is sentimentality.

Carpenter argues that while anger is a neglected element of a broad range of sentimental texts, it should be recognized as a particularly salient subject in early literature written by Native American women. To date, most literary scholars—whether they understand sentimentality in terms of sympathetic relations or of manipulative influence—have viewed anger as an obstacle to the genre. Placing anger and sentimentality in opposition, however, neglects their complex and often intimate relationship. This case study of three Native American women writers is not meant to fall easily into either the “pro” or “anti” sentimentality camp, but to acknowledge sentimentality as a fraught, yet potentially useful, mode for articulating indigenous women’s anger.

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Blocker: A Little More Freedom

A Little More Freedom

African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930

Jack S. Blocker

Why did African Americans move from the rural South to the metropolitan North? Scholars have shown that African Americans took part in the urbanization of American society between the Civil War and the Great Depression, but the racial dimensions of their migration have remained unclear. A Little More Freedom is the first study to trace African American locational choices during the crucial period when migrants created pathways that would shape mobility through the twentieth century and beyond.

This book identifies an “age of the village” for black Midwesterners, when Civil War and postwar migrants distributed themselves evenly across the urban hierarchies of the region. Using four case studies of Washington Court House, Ohio; Springfield, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois; and Muncie, Indiana, Blocker shows what life was like for African Americans in small towns and small cities, thus illuminating the reasons why most blacks ultimately chose to leave such places in favor of metropolitan centers such as Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cleveland. Previous scholars have emphasized the role of racist white violence as the catalyst, but A Little More Freedom takes a more nuanced approach.

Emphasis upon racist violence and Jim Crow has inadvertently tended to portray African Americans as victims and their migrations as flight from danger and oppression. While not downplaying white racism, A Little More Freedom tries to recreate the threats and opportunities in urban places of different sizes as seen through the eyes of migrants.

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