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Journal Article
American Literature (2017) 89 (2): 225–253.
Published: 01 June 2017
... educational value can help us better understand today’s debates about fiction’s role in the classroom, because they reveal just how much is taken for granted in our contemporary arguments about fiction. The article argues that recent work on fictionality (and on historical poetics generally) allows us to come...
Journal Article
American Literature (2019) 91 (1): 31–58.
Published: 01 March 2019
...Sara Marcus Abstract This essay argues that the African American literature of the nadir, written during a moment when concepts of evolution and departures from linear time were deployed to the detriment of black life as well as in its defense, is a rich archive for analyzing the unpredictable...
Journal Article
American Literature (2013) 85 (2): 273–301.
Published: 01 June 2013
... Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Durn’d Fool (1867)— arguing for a new point of departure from the level of locality and with special attention to democratic decision making. Most nation-oriented readings portray the humor of the Old Southwest either as a regional subset supplementing nationalization via print...
Journal Article
American Literature (2014) 86 (3): 463–492.
Published: 01 September 2014
...Kathleen Howard Howard’s essay argues for the significance of antebellum evangelical tract tales both as precedents for later best-selling works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and as provocations to consider our critical understandings of literariness. Tract tales belonged to a moment in which...
Journal Article
American Literature (2020) 92 (1): 61–89.
Published: 01 March 2020
...Hannah Walser Abstract This essay analyzes the discourse of the fugitive slave advertisement (FSA) to argue that these texts form what I call a “genre of personhood.” Centered on physical and behavioral descriptions of escaped slaves, FSAs offer a window into the heuristics that slaveholders used...
Journal Article
American Literature (2020) 92 (3): 485–511.
Published: 01 September 2020
...Philomena Polefrone Abstract This essay argues that American literary naturalism engages with the Anthropocene at the moment it began to be visible, the turn of the twentieth century, and specifically identifies the role of finance in precipitating the crisis. Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901...
Journal Article
American Literature (2020) 92 (4): 623–652.
Published: 01 December 2020
...Tamlyn Avery Abstract As Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant...
Journal Article
American Literature (2021) 93 (3): 445–472.
Published: 01 September 2021
...Rebecca Evans Abstract This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory : a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes...
Journal Article
American Literature (2022) 94 (1): 181–209.
Published: 01 March 2022
... and symbolic value of national boundaries through the deployment of specific gameplay mechanics and storytelling elements. However, as this essay argues, border games do more than merely represent borders in games; they reflect how borders themselves might be experienced as games within the cultural logic...
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Journal Article
American Literature (2011) 83 (2): 389–411.
Published: 01 June 2011
... relinquishing a presumably dirty and immature gay past in favor of a newfound respectability. Claiming that this process of cleansing works to create a “deadened subjectivity,” he links the contemporary struggles of gay men and lesbians with that of enslaved Africans by arguing that the ideological structures...
Journal Article
American Literature (2017) 89 (3): 497–527.
Published: 01 September 2017
... impoverished. These difficulties, I argue, arose not just from the systems of industrial publishing but also from the systems of political value instituted by art in what Jacques Rancière calls the “aesthetic regime.” I pursue this hypothesis by examining contemporary texts that argue for authors’ rights...
Journal Article
American Literature (2018) 90 (3): 585–612.
Published: 01 September 2018
...Kristin Grogan Abstract This essay explores the relationship between Langston Hughes’s 1930s poetry and the Soviet avant-garde theater. It argues that the constructivist theater provides an aesthetic framework through which to read Hughes’s radical poetry. Often read as an artistic failure...
FIGURES
Journal Article
American Literature (2022) 94 (2): 331–355.
Published: 01 June 2022
...Hannah Manshel Abstract This article reads Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) alongside Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017) to argue that both texts challenge the ideology of property ownership that has long been central to Black and Indigenous subjugation. By reading...
Journal Article
American Literature (2011) 83 (4): 719–746.
Published: 01 December 2011
...Jennifer L. Brady By reconsidering the complex, dialectical relationship that existed between novels and their detractors in the antebellum United States, Brady's essay argues that antinovel commentators aimed not simply to limit the activity of novel reading but to redefine what it is and, more...
Journal Article
American Literature (2012) 84 (3): 477–504.
Published: 01 September 2012
...Paul Gilmore In this essay, Gilmore argues that examining the largely forgotten early romances of John Neal within a transatlantic framework leads to a reconsideration of our understanding of romanticism in the United States. Focusing on Randolph (1823) and Logan (1822), he draws parallels between...
Journal Article
American Literature (2012) 84 (2): 381–408.
Published: 01 June 2012
...Heather Houser Houser’s essay argues for the centrality of sickness and affect to twenty-first-century environmental consciousness and therefore to ecocriticism, through an analysis of Richard Powers’s novel, The Echo Maker . The essay focuses on wonder, an essential affect for promoting...
Journal Article
American Literature (2012) 84 (2): 409–435.
Published: 01 June 2012
... of texts that take up this mode of invested indirection in their content and form alike, she argues for a spinster ecology that alters our notion not only of where the future lies but also of how (or if) it arrives. Ensor turns first to Silent Spring to argue that Rachel Carson’s intransitive understanding...
Journal Article
American Literature (2015) 87 (1): 159–186.
Published: 01 March 2015
...-simultaneous (re)publication a chronocanon . The chronocanon, I argue, can serve as a means by which an oppositional group articulates its position to a broadly construed public and, in so doing, deploys literature in an attempt to produce a new hegemonic formation. In particular, I focus on the way...
Journal Article
American Literature (2016) 88 (1): 1–29.
Published: 01 March 2016
...Meredith L. McGill In this essay I examine the disruption to the textual order caused by reprinted texts, arguing that the American tradition of textual editing can help us identify some of the invisible forms of repetition that structure the literary field. Pioneering figures such as W. W. Greg...
Journal Article
American Literature (2015) 87 (4): 769–798.
Published: 01 December 2015
...Benjamin Mangrum This essay charts the development of two entwined intellectual threads during the 1950s: the translation of European existentialism into an American idiom and what Nathan Hale describes as the “golden age of popularization” for psychoanalysis in the United States. I argue...
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