... rehearsing the dis- course of identity politics, this material works to reconstruct our sense of what constitutes American identities. It is worth noting that such a move does not only implicate the literature of recent authors: it also requires us to rethink our understanding of the past in crucial ways...

..., and the short stories feature more prominently than in years past. Scholarship on Ernest Hemingway also stresses influences on the writer and offers innovative perspectives on the Cuban and African works. Inquiry dedicated to reassessing Heming- way’s wartime biography and war writing predominates...

... Irish background), Nowlin demonstrates that for a variety of cultural and personal reasons Fitzgerald found race an effective way of making distinctions in his life and his work by delineating between what was popular (black) and what was artistically superior (white). Nowlin’s...

...- or herself to the reader. Chapter discusses Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway and chapter Faulkner s Go Down, Moses, show- ing the ways mourning at times fails on both personal and social levels. Penner closes with a brief re ection on the book s principles, closing by observing that the ethical obligations of those...

... an unexpurgated biblical commentary and finds an author struggling to align miraculous events and Newtonian science. Mather tried to distinguish between underlying meaning (intended truth) and the ways language was used in the past to instruct, but his effort frequently results in a separation between...

...Nicolas S. Witschi © 2015 Duke University Press 2015 13  Late-19th-Century Literature Nicolas S. Witschi The dominant investigative trends continue to emphasize the ways region and the Civil War were of deep concern to artists in the period. Perhaps consequently, attempts...

... race even as he seemed to be defining himself the champion of all Ameri- cans. David Baker’s “Song of Sanity” ( pp. 7–12) asserts that Whitman’s Civil War experiences made the political abstraction of war a concrete Amanda Gailey and Daniel Manheim 53 reality, and that we can see the way he...

....” I was particularly struck by the way she sets Faulkner against Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Cather’s The Professor’s House, inves- tigating the body of the mother in relation to masculinity and art. In his revision of this paradigm, Waid argues, Faulkner racializes it. Much of Waid’s analysis...

...Nicolas S. Witschi © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 13  Late-19th-Century Literature Nicolas S. Witschi Not one but two biographies of notable figures lead the way this year, while studies of William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Cho- pin, and Frank Norris appear...

... it all the way through that first volume, and certainly most did not move on to the next two. That is a shame, for if they had persevered, they would have found in volumes 2 and 3 a grab bag of memories, observations, humor- ous gems, and philosophical insights. The whole book as we now have...

... and the Federalists has defined for many the ways we imagine the literary and political histories of the 19th century. Dowling looks closely at the example of Joseph Dennie and the origin of ‘‘literary Federalism an intellectual attitude that James Russell Lowell later called ‘‘a Toryism of the nerves...

... of scholarly attention that renew their work for readers and suggest productive new ways to approach them. It might seem as if nothing more could be said about the rise and fall of Cullen; an old and sturdy literary historical narrative has explained the arc of his career—poet...

... (Syracuse) by Gary Scharnhorst. Field was an “unorthodox feminist” who led the way for women as a professional journalist, actor, and publisher, and she was a direct inspi- ration to both Henry James and Anthony Trollope. Ironically enough, the dearth of personal documentation about Field’s private...

... gives way to anxious self-defense. In “The East in British-American Writing: English Identity, John Smith’s True Travels, and Severed Heads,” pp. 103–17 in Mary Floyd- Wilson and Garrett Sullivan, eds., Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Palgrave). Jim Egan...

... letters, letters to him, his whereabouts, his activities, and news articles about him. This volume also includes excerpts from Isabel Lyon’s journals. At 1,451 pages, this reference work will help researchers in ways that cannot be imagined. The entire set is very helpful, even if it is marred...

... recent work on Faulkner s screenwriting career identifies more nuance in that aspect of Faulkner s life than Curnutt acknowledges, but his biography offers rich detail in concise form, contextualizing Faulkner as a laborer in words, largely using his personality as a way to illuminate that labor...

... assessments of the most important trends of the Depression decade, the volume s contributors address such topics as aesthetics and politics, the literary debate surrounding Marxism, the way a concern with formal innovation coexisted with a reliance on traditional narra- tive strategies, avant-garde poetry...

... of Faulkner critical studies” by redefining the way critics attend to contend- ing voices and representations. Pamela Knights, “Rhetorical and Reader- Response Criticism” (pp. 233–60), traces the long history of reader-based criticism, rooted in the high demands made on readers by Faulkner’s writing...

... precise assess- ment’’ of Faulkner’s debt to the philosopher. A theoretical introduction is the most provocative, if cryptic, chapter, outlining the ways in which Faulkner used language to transcend the need for language, to work English beyond the literal, beyond the word, which at once...

...Dale Fancher Enggass Copyright © 2022 Duke University Press 2022 [email protected] 19 Poetry: The 1950s to the Present Dale Fancher Enggass i Reading Form Two books by Craig Dworkin aim to demonstrate the interpretive potentials of unusual ways of reading (and writing) for literary...