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JournalISSN: 0004-1610

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 

Johns Hopkins University Press
About: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory is an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Poetry. It has an ISSN identifier of 0004-1610. Over the lifetime, 769 publications have been published receiving 3499 citations. The journal is also known as: Arizona quarterly, a journal of American literature, culture, & theory & Journal of American literature, culture, & theory.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In fact, very few Americans cherished Whittier for his antislavery activism before the American Civil War as discussed by the authors, and this concentrated disavowal of his anti-slavery work meant that readers had to ignore most of his poetry in order to celebrate him as a poet.
Abstract: N american poet was more celebrated in the late nineteenth century than John Greenleaf Whittier. In December 1877 his seventieth birthday was nationally recognized and publicly honored by schoolchildren, teachers, reading groups, ministers, fellow authors, politicians, and newspapers and magazines across the country (at the end of the year he allegedly wrote twenty-three hundred replies to well-wishers) (Letters 3: 367). Schools, colleges, streets, ships, towns, mountains, and even a glacier were all named in his honor during the last decades of his life. But this massive memorial effort belied the relatively slender poetic basis of Whittier’s popular poetic celebrity after the American Civil War. Americans of the postbellum era celebrated Whittier for being the poet of everyday life in rural New England, and for writing poems that captured the texture of New England history, supernaturalism, and folklore; very few Americans cherished Whittier for his antislavery activism before the Civil War. This concentrated disavowal of his antislavery work meant that readers had to ignore most of Whittier’s poetry in order to celebrate him as a poet. Whittier’s career had begun in the 1820s; he had become prominent as an antislavery poet associated first with William Lloyd Garrison, then with the political antislavery movement, and eventually with the Republican Party. He published scores of antislavery poems from the 1830s onward, which were printed in broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, books, giftbooks, and anthologies, and which were recited and sung frequently throughout the antebellum decades and during the Civil War.

58 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The United States of America is an ordinary country in an ordinary place, given to ordinary national ambitions, and typically violent expansionist methods as discussed by the authors, and most American historians avoid this interpretation, preferring instead to chart the politics that led up to the conflict, the progress of battles, or the internal tensions that followed it.
Abstract: O reading of the u.s.–mexican war leads to a sobering conclusion: the United States of America is an ordinary country in an ordinary place, given to ordinary national ambitions, and typically violent expansionist methods. With few exceptions, most American historians of the war avoid this interpretation, preferring instead to chart the politics that led up to the conflict, the progress of battles, or the internal tensions that followed it. Rarely do they delve into its particular and massive contradictions, an elision attesting to the persistent narrative power of American exceptionalism. In the 1840s, that political mythology framed a dubious war against a sovereign country as an act of self-defense, justified by moral obligations, and grounded in America’s putative role as a light of freedom. Many Americans of the era, infused with a surging nationalism, saw the conflict’s necessity and justice as self-evident. Jingoistic war supporters like Walt Whitman unquestioningly declared Mexico’s European anachronism to be by definition opposed to America’s globally redemptive purpose. But even before it began, contemporary politicians and writers were debating the war’s morality and justice. Dubious at best, at worst a spectacularly unprovoked aggression, the war, fought from 1846 to 1848, required an imaginative re-arrangement into the framework of exceptionalist belief because it could so obviously demonstrate that America’s national mythology could also be a veneer for greed and violence—perhaps not the redeeming enterprise of a republic dedicated to the advancement of democracy and freedom. Predictably, many writers

57 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Eaton was the fitst Chinese-American woman writei, expressed feelings as a Eutasian as mentioned in this paper, who was virtually the only one who engaged in wtiting imaginative literature rathet than social-anthropological works.
Abstract: Thus sui sin far (Edith Maud Eaton, 1865-1914),1 the fitst Chinese-American woman writei, expressed het feelings as a Eutasian. Among the eatly Chinese immigrant authots, she was virtually the only one who engaged in wtiting imaginative literature rathet than social-anthropological works. Owing to het talents in writing and deep insight into the themes she presents, she achieved great success. At a time when there was strong bias against writers of Chinese ancestty in mainstream Ametican literature, her works were carried by major literary journals and newspapers throughout America, including The Century, The Independent, New Enghnd, The Overhnd Monthly, and The New York Evening Post. Thirty-seven of het previously published stoties—\"my deat children\" as she modestly called them—latet were collected in a volume entitled Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which won critical and populat acclaim.2 \"Quaint, lovable characters are the Chinese,\" said the publishers advettisement in the New York Times, \"who appeal in these unusual and exquisite stoties—stoties that will open an entirely new world to many readers.\"' The fact that her work is favorably reviewed in the newly-published Columbia Literary History of the United

45 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The U.S. South aptly serves as a metaphorical bridge between the northern and southern halves of the American hemisphere because, as Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith argue in their introduction to Look Away!: The U. S. South comes to occupy a space unique within modernity: a space simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and Southern (both in the global sense) as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: T literature of the u.s. south has found new life in the burgeoning field of inter-American literary studies.1 Both the U.S. South’s literatures and its histories have played key roles in the academic attempt to connect the literatures and histories of the United States to those of Latin America and the Caribbean from the groundbreaking work of Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia’s 1986 collection, Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America, through Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s “invitation or come-on” (5) to study American literatures side by side in his 1990 edited volume, Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? to Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine's recent collection, Hemispheric American Studies. The U.S. South aptly serves as the metaphorical bridge between the northern and southern halves of the American hemisphere because, as Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith argue in their introduction to Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, “the U.S. South comes to occupy a space unique within modernity: a space simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and southern (both in the global sense)” (9). With the importance of the U.S. South in this inter-American conversation, it is surprising that very few scholars examine the work of Katherine Anne Porter from a hemispheric approach, especially considering Porter’s involvement in Mexican art and politics in the early 1920s and again in the early 1930s.2 Thomas F. Walsh’s Katherine Anne

41 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: De Burgos as discussed by the authors examines acclaimed Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos's letters, newspaper articles, and poems for traces of New York City, the place where she resided during the last decade of her life and which she came to call her second home.
Abstract: This essay examines acclaimed Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos’s letters, newspaper articles, and poems for traces of New York City, the place where she resided during the last decade of her life and which she came to call her “second home.” While she was deeply committed to the cause of Puerto Rican independence, she also became increasingly concerned with the plight of Puerto Ricans and Latina/os on the mainland and particularly those who lived in New York City. Her writings from and about New York reveal an ambivalence toward the metropolis that is rooted in imperial history and in her position as artist, activist, woman, and migrant.

40 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
202312
202226
20216
20204
201920
201824