Showing papers in "American Literature in 1998"

That the people might live : Native American literatures and Native American community

Abstract: In this book Weaver looks at Native American literature in order to reflect on Native American values and spirituality. In 500 years of contact and colonization Christianity has been unable to displace traditional religious beliefs and practice, Weaver notes, and even among Indians who consider themselves Christian, traditional ways are often still important and honored. Many practise syncretism and religious dimorphism, religious pluralism that often produces communal tensions and misunderstandings that undermine the work of community organization. Weaver argues, however, that Native American literature speaks across these divisions and he offers a broad reading of several centuries of literature to develop the idea of "communitism"-a nexus of communal and communitarian values that is the bedrock of Native spirituality. His detailed analysis of a diverse set of writings-biographies, tribal histories, novels, plays, etc.-sheds fascinating light on an important and neglected aspect of American literature.

Reading at the social limit : affect, mass culture, and Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract: The work of Edgar Allan Poe and his true place in the literary canon continues to provoke debate. Many critics have been puzzled as to how Poe can stand simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres, including detective and science fiction and certain modes of sensational or Gothic horror. Arguing that Poe is not exceptional but exemplary in this ambivalent relationship to mass culture, the author offers a new theory of mass culture and ideology through extended analysis of four motifs in Poe's works: the notion of the uncanny and its link to anxieties about originality; Gothic horror and identification; the confessional psychopath; and the figure of the dupe and the 'logic of the hoax.'

Lighting out for the territory : reflections on Mark Twain and American culture

Abstract: Mark Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that 'all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn'. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase 'New Deal' from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Twain's Gilded Age gave an entire era its name. Twain is everywhere - in ads for Bass Ale, in episodes of 'Star Trek,' as a greeter in Nevada's Silver Legacy casino. Clearly, the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. In Lighting Out for the Territory, Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin blends personal narrative with reflections on history, literature, and popular culture to provide a lively and provocative look at who Mark Twain really was, how he got to be that way, and what we do with his legacy today. Fishkin illuminates the many ways that America has embraced Mark Twain - from the scenes and plots of his novels, to his famous quips, to his bushy-haired, white-suited persona. She reveals that we have constructed a Twain often far removed from the actual writer. For instance, we travel to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's home town, a locale that in his work is both the embodiment of the innocence of childhood and also an emblem of hypocrisy, barbarity, and moral rot. The author spotlights the fact that Hannibal today attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists and takes in millions yearly, by focusing on Tom Sawyer's boyhood exploits - marble-shoots and white-washed fences - and ignoring Twain's portraits of the darker side of the slave South. The narrative moves back and forth from modern Hannibal to antebellum Hannibal and to Mark Twain's childhood experiences with brutality and slavery. Her exploration of those subjects in his work shows that Tom Sawyer's fence isn't the only thing being white-washed in Hannibal. Fishkin's research yields fresh insights into the remarkable story of how this child of slaveholders became the author of the most powerful anti-racist novel by an American. Whether lending his name to a pizza parlor in Louisiana, a diner in Jackson Heights, New York, or an asteroid in outer space, whether making cameo appearances on 'Cheers' and 'Bonanza', or turning up in novels as a detective or a love interest, Mark Twain's presence in contemporary culture is pervasive and intriguing. Fishkin's wide-ranging examination of that presence demonstrates how Twain and his work echo, ripple, and reverberate throughout our society. We learn that Walt Disney was a great fan of Twain's fiction (in fact, 'Tom Sawyer's Island' in Disneyland is the only part of the park that Disney himself designed) as is Chuck Jones, who credits the genesis of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote to the comic description of a coyote in Roughing It. We learn of Mark Twain impersonators (Hal Holbrook, for instance, has played Twain in some 1,500 performances) and recent movie versions of Twain books, such as A Million to Juan. And we discover how Twain's image can be seen in claymation, in animatronics and robotics, in virtual reality, and on any number of home-pages on the Internet. Lighting Out for the Territory offers an engrossing look at how Mark Twain's life and work have been cherished, memorialized, exploited, and misunderstood. It offers a wealth of insight into Twain, into his work, and into our nation, both past and present.

Partisans and poets : the political work of American poetry in the Great War

Abstract: Introduction Partisan poetics, circa 1914 1. I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier: The Woman's Peace Party and the Pacifist Majority 2. The new society within the shell of the old: Wobbly Parody Poetical and Political 3. The barbarians at the gate: The Soldier-Poet and the Great War in Black and White 4. Marketing patriotism: The Frugal Housewife and the Consumption of Poetry 5. Beating the competition: The Woman's Peace Party and the Industrial Workers of the World on Trial 6. While this war lasts: Readerly Resistance on the Colour Line and the Bread Line Conclusion: history and poetry in the age of irony.

H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence@@@H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: Dramatis Personae: The Aesthete Androgyne and the Femme Fatale 1. The Rhetoric of Anti-Romanticism: gendered genealogies of male modernism 2. H. D.'s Early Decadent Masks and Images: HER Sea Garden Part I. The Aesthete Androgyne: 3. Writing the Decadent Boy Androgyne: Whiteness, Diaphaneite, Poikilia and Male Statuary 4. Across Gender, across Sexuality: H. D.'s male masking and the sexual narrative: Hippolytus Temporarizes, 'Heliodroa' Part II. The Femme Fatale: 5. Towards a Revised Myth of Origins: from the diaphanous androgyne to the abject femme fatale 6. From Agon to 'Heros Fatale': Pre-Raphaelite transformations of male modernism/modernity 7. Feminine Abjection and Trilogy Postscript Notes Index.

Henry James's last romance : making sense of the past and the American scene

Abstract: Introduction: at home: the reception of Henry James Part I. Henry James's Last Romance: The Sense of the Past: 1. The sense of the present 2. The sense of a happy ending Part II. Civilization and its Contents: The American Scene: 3. Making signs of the past: interpretation and C. S. Peirce 4. Waste makes taste: Classicism, conspicuous consumption, and Thorstein Veblen 5. 'Psychic Mulattos': the ambiguity of race and W. E. B. Du Bois 6. The return of the alien: Ethnic identity and Jakob A. Riis Part III. Patrimony and Matrimony: The Ivory Tower: 7. Heterosocial acts: the ambiguity of gender in the New World 8. Odd couples: Henry James Senior and Jacques Lacan 9. Irony makes love: Mrs Henry James and Washington, AC/DC.

The Prefaces of Henry James: Framing the Modern Reader

Abstract: The first decade of the twentieth century saw Henry James at work selecting and revising his novels and tales for a collection of his work known as the New York Edition. James not only made extensive revisions of his early works; he added eighteen prefaces that provide what many readers believe to be the best commentary on his fiction. John Pearson argues here for a reading of the prefaces within the context of the New York Edition as James's attempt to construct an ideal reader, one attentive to his art and authorial performance. Throughout his discussion of the eighteen prefaces, Pearson examines the strategies that James implements for preparing the reader for the prefaced texts. He argues that James sought to create the modern reader, one who would learn to appreciate and discriminate his literary art through reading the prefaces. By demonstrating that the prefaces frame the novels and tales in aesthetic histories that are authorized and authenticated by the author-historian's personal memory, Pearson accomplishes his analysis of James's use of the frame and how it systematically instructed the reader in the Jamesian aesthetic of fiction. Through close readings of several of the novels and tales including The Awkward Age, What Maisie Knew, The Portrait of a Lady, The Aspern Papers, and The Wings of the Dove, Pearson's comprehensive study examines the various framing strategies at work and considers the broader theoretical implications of reading through the prefaces. Pearson's eclectic theoretical approach, similar to the recent poststructural work of John Carlos Rowe, makes a complex argument accessible to an educated reader untutored in recent poststructural literary theory.

Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives

Abstract: In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.