...Ed White © 2014 Duke University Press 2014 Part II 11  Literature to 1800 Ed White i  Native America A notable number of this year’s monographs venture syntheses of various sorts. Building on her Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early...

... reassess the recent criticism of the racism of 70s feminism and white women s writing in general. In separate essays Fetterley s My Sister! My Sister : The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick s Hope Leslie (AL 70: 491 516) and Pryse s Sex, Class, and Category Crisis : Reading Jewett s Transitivity...

... about a young black woman who runs from blackness toward a deaden- ing, transcendent whiteness. It also may have been a story about a young black woman who runs toward and finds revelation in blackness. Yet the play’s very wandering, the endless shape-shifting of characters and story, resists...

... and emerging theories of masculinity in Faulkner’s work. Also breaking new ground, Jay Watson edits a special double issue of the Faulkner Journal (22, i–ii) on the topic “Faulkner and Whiteness.” His introduction to that number, “Situating Whiteness in Faulkner Studies, Situating Faulkner in Whiteness...

... that the president was using some extraordinary language in endorsing a Broadway show that was, after all, a private business. And yet the statement positions the musical as a new articulation of what it is to be American: Going to this show, the president basically was saying, means you are going to the White...

... entertains them but does not fully answer them, primarily because Faulkner was conflicted on matters of race. On the one hand, his public statements on race and the civil rights movement positioned him at best as a white moderate, one who was willing to recognize the common humanity of Black people and white...

... and then as an adult by the contacts he made with cultures and people around the world.” Ultimately, he “was so conflicted about his own racial identity . . . that his writings on race more closely resemble the work of minority writers of color” than that of his white contempo- raries. London became aware early...

... on Queequeg, whose virtues of incon- sistency, irreverence, and gameness provide a revealing antithesis to the cultural values embodied in white society. Sanborn also relates how Goethe s Theory of Colors leads Melville to further reflect on the vacant sign that cannibalism represents. Finally, Sanborn shows...

... to the 1930s London’s practice of naturalism is at issue in Jeanne Campbell Rees- man’s “Rough Justice in Jack London’s ‘Mauki’ ” (StAN 1: 42–69). In reading “Mauki”—a London South Seas tale in which the eponymous hero skins the white master who had tortured him by using the master’s own tool...

... Douglass’s ‘‘autobiographies and his one work of fiction, ‘The Heroic Slave,’ cautiously resist indiscriminate sympathy even while acknowledging the political e≈cacy of compassion On the flip side of sympathy, Linda M. Grasso’s The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature...

..., it is because they remain transfixed by the debt those histories represent for them Chapter 3, ‘‘ ‘You Want My Life The Debts of History shows how ‘‘these debts are inseparable from issues of property, a property which begins in the ownership of the self. While Faulkner’s young white men struggle...

... content to locate the story’s principal meaning in the growing maturity of the white Compson children, and particularly Quentin, Bollinger criticizes this position as a version of what she characterizes, citing Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, as the “parasitical nature of white freedom.” She...

... and American Fiction (Mass.) Timothy Parrish has two goals, the overt one of which is to argue against “the claims of recent postmodern theory that history works as fiction does.” He begins the project by analyzing Absalom, Absalom! as “the creation of a white Southern American gentleman fiercely loyal...

... interchangeable machine parts, some novels delineate how they try to “decommodify” themselves, often through organized action spear- headed by the IWW or the CIO. Ashley Craig Lancaster’s The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress: Poor White Women in Southern Literature of the Great Depression (LSU...

... tale. In “Jack London’s Wolf Cubs, Michael Serres’s Burning Ship, and the Creaturely Situation” (EJES 19: 55–65) Michael H. Rowe considers White Fang in light of the environ- mental materiality espoused by Michael Serres. In this post-Cartesian philosophy, both wolves and humans are subject...

... Stein to Rudolph Fisher and Pauline Hopkins. There are important new collections on Zora Neale Hurston, John Dos Passos, and H. P. Lovecraft this year, and new biographies of Jack London, Carl Van Vechten, Abraham Cahan, and the white women who played an important role in the Harlem...

... sympathy with both Carrie and Ames is part of his own “divided habitus” in the literary market, or as earlier critics have described it, a feeling of belonging at once to both classes and to neither. Athena Devlin’s Between Profits and Primitivism: Shaping White Middle-Class Masculinity...

... of Southern History 69: 549–85) argues that white Ameri- cans traveling to Europe tended to set aside regional views on slavery out of an American nationalism which ‘‘fus[ed] privileged northerners and southerners into an American upper class It is just this sense of upper- class privilege that likely...

... this perspective and place him in their company. That desire on Chesnutt’s part might not have been such a good idea in the first place, Matthew Wilson thinks, and he makes an interesting point. In ‘‘Who Has the Right to Say? Charles W. Chesnutt, Whiteness, and the Public Sphere’’ (CollL 26, ii: 18–35...

... oriented essays on other women writers in the second, which focuses on race and class, is not clear. Pamela Glenn Menke’s ‘‘Behind the ‘White Veil’: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Creole Color, and The Goodness of St. Rocque’’ (pp. 77–88) credits Dunbar-Nelson with more thoroughly cap- turing the complex...