Richard Gray

Bio: Richard Gray is an academic researcher from University of Essex. The author has contributed to research in topics: Poetry & American poetry. The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 20 publications receiving 537 citations. Previous affiliations of Richard Gray include University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11

Abstract: Acknowledgments ix 1 After the Fall 1 2 Imagining Disaster 21 3 Imagining Crisis 51 4 Imagining the Transnational 85 5 Imagining the Crisis in Drama and Poetry 145 Works Cited 193 Index 211

Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis

Abstract: The eminent Anglo-American Henry James once observed that “the flower of art blossoms only when the soil is deep . . . it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature” (23). By now, the US has a great deal of history. In the last 20 years alone, since the first issue of American Literary History appeared, the US has witnessed the disintegration of its sinister other, the USSR, and it has also borne witness to the birth of a world characterized by transnational drift, the triumph of global capitalism, and the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism. That, perhaps, suggests several tensions that this great deal of history of the past two decades has generated. American culture may have become internationally dominant but the US itself has been internationalized; America may be the sole remaining superpower, but it is a superpower that seems haunted by fear—fear, among other things, of its own possible impotence and potential decline. In the global marketplace, it may well be America that is now the biggest item on sale; in a postcolonial world, it equally well may be that the imagination has now been colonized by the US. But the US itself has become what Ishmael Reed has called “the first universal nation” (55), and some of our sense of what it means now to be an American can be telegraphed in a series of numbers and names that have become almost iconic and suggest the very opposite of triumphalism: 9/11, the “war on terror,” Al Quaeda, Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. “The world is here” (56), Reed declared in “America: The Multinational Society” (1988), an essay published, in book form, in the year American Literary History first appeared. And the world is here, in the US, for two seminal reasons. The first is that particular

The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography

Abstract: Introduction: fictions of history - an approach to Faulkner. Part 1 On privacy: Faulkner and the human subject history as autobiography - the world of Faulkner autobiography as history - the life of Faulkner. Part 2 Faulkner the apprentice: trying out different voices - the early prose and poetry of loss and longing - soldier's pay and mosquitoes. Part 3 Rewriting the homeplace: ancestor worship, patricide and the epic past - flags in the dust and sartoris voices, absence and cultural autobiography - "The Sound of the Fury" a Southern carnival - "As I Lay Dying" and woman was invented - "Sanctuary". Part 4 Of past and present conflicts: language, power and the verbal community - "Light in August" the virile pilot and the seductions of the aitr - "Pylon" history is what hurts - "Absalom, Absalom!" the plantation romance and the madwoman in the attic - "The Unvanquished". Part 5 Public faces and private places: now about these women - "The Wild Palms" let's make a deal - "The Hamlet" things fall apart - "Go Down, Moses" watching the detectives - "Intruder in the Dust". Part 6 The way home: finished and unfinished business - "Knight's Gambit" and "Requiem For A Nun" of crowds, control and courage - "A Fable" distant voice, desperate lives - "The Towns" then the letting go - "The Mansion". Postscript - back to Earth: the romance of the family- "The Reivers" "I was Here" - Faulkner family tree.

Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South

Abstract: This article examines the process of racialization as an essential aspect of how everyday geographies are made, understood, and challenged. It begins from the premise that a primary root of modern American race relations can be found in the southern past, especially in how that past was imagined, articulated, and performed during a crucial period: the post-Reconstruction era known as “Jim Crow.” More than just a reaction to a turbulent world where Civil War defeat destabilized categories of power and authority, white cultural memory there became an active ingredient in defining life in the New South. The culture of segregation that mobilized such memories, and the forgetting that inevitably accompanied them, relied on performance, ritualized choreographies of race and place, and gender and class, in which participants knew their roles and acted them out for each other and for visitors. Among the displays of white southern memory most active during Jim Crow, the Natchez Pilgrimage stands out. Elit...

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

Abstract: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to \"put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature\". Author of \"Beloved\", \"The Bluest Eye\", \"Song of Solomon\", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis

Abstract: The eminent Anglo-American Henry James once observed that “the flower of art blossoms only when the soil is deep . . . it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature” (23). By now, the US has a great deal of history. In the last 20 years alone, since the first issue of American Literary History appeared, the US has witnessed the disintegration of its sinister other, the USSR, and it has also borne witness to the birth of a world characterized by transnational drift, the triumph of global capitalism, and the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism. That, perhaps, suggests several tensions that this great deal of history of the past two decades has generated. American culture may have become internationally dominant but the US itself has been internationalized; America may be the sole remaining superpower, but it is a superpower that seems haunted by fear—fear, among other things, of its own possible impotence and potential decline. In the global marketplace, it may well be America that is now the biggest item on sale; in a postcolonial world, it equally well may be that the imagination has now been colonized by the US. But the US itself has become what Ishmael Reed has called “the first universal nation” (55), and some of our sense of what it means now to be an American can be telegraphed in a series of numbers and names that have become almost iconic and suggest the very opposite of triumphalism: 9/11, the “war on terror,” Al Quaeda, Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. “The world is here” (56), Reed declared in “America: The Multinational Society” (1988), an essay published, in book form, in the year American Literary History first appeared. And the world is here, in the US, for two seminal reasons. The first is that particular