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Journal Article

“This Alarming Generosity”: White Elephants and the Logic of the Gift

Ross Bullen
American Literature (2011) 83 (4): 747–773.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437207
Published: 01 December 2011
...Ross Bullen In this essay, Bullen examines the literary and cultural history of the term white elephant —a phrase that refers to a burdensome object that is impossible to sell or give away—by tracing its origin in the American lexicon to the United States' diplomatic relations with Siam...
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Journal Article

Index to Volume 83

American Literature (2011) 83 (4): 893–914.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1503866
Published: 01 December 2011
..., Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature, 868–70. Brady, Jennifer L. “Theorizing a Reading Public: Sentimentality and Advice about Novel Reading in the Antebellum United States,” 719–46. Bullen, Ross. “‘This Alarming Generosity’: White Elephants and the Logic of the Gift,” 747...
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Journal Article

Jurassic Park Technology in the Bioinformatics Economy: How Cloning Narratives Negotiate the Telos of DNA

Stephanie S. Turner
American Literature (2002) 74 (4): 887–909.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-74-4-887
Published: 01 December 2002
... The reader is introduced to Hammond as an entrepreneur in ‘‘consumer biologicals’’ when he presents, as his calling card to interest potential investors, a tiny dwarf elephant as an example of his proposed stock of genetically engineered life forms. But the miniature elephant...
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Journal Article

“To Explain Grace Requires a Curious Hand”: Marianne Moore's Interdisciplinary Digressions

Srikanth Reddy
American Literature (2005) 77 (3): 451–481.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-77-3-451
Published: 01 September 2005
... nature is to classify it as an allegory or a fable, yet such readings overlook what sets the pangolin apart from the sphere of the human: Thegiant-pangolin- tail, graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like an elephant’s trunk with special skin, is not lost...
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Journal Article

An Overstory for Our Time

Rachel Adams
American Literature (2020) 92 (4): 799–807.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8781019
Published: 01 December 2020
... the environment in ways that could not have been anticipated by Powers’s novel. Interspersed with news of death and devastation are stories of ecological resilience: dolphins and swans reappearing in the waterways of Venice, elephants feasting on abandoned crops in Yunnan province. These turned out to be fake...
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Journal Article

The New Queer Essentialism

Shane Vogel
American Literature (2011) 83 (1): 175–184.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-067
Published: 01 March 2011
... the etymological con- nection between motion and motive to consider children’s agency and violence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (and its subsequent film adap- tations), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Peter Jackson’s film Heav- enly Creatures, and Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant. Other chapters con- sider...
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Journal Article

Epistemology of the Jungle: Progressive-Era Sexuality and the Nature of the Beast

Michael Lundblad
American Literature (2009) 81 (4): 747–773.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-045
Published: 01 December 2009
... of major U.S. periodicals that Lon- don, among others, was a “Nature Faker,” depicting unrealistic natural history in his wild-animal stories; or the public electrocution of Topsy, a circus elephant, at Coney Island in 1903; or the display of Ota Benga, an African man, in the Monkey House...
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Journal Article

Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre”

Madeline Zehnder
American Literature (2021) 93 (2): 167–194.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003540
Published: 01 June 2021
... as an elephant tusk harvested in the Congo River Basin, sub-Saharan African grasslands, or less commonly, in India (Alpers 1975 : 86–87). 6 From these interior sites, traders, porters, and enslaved laborers transported tusks to major ports such as Calabar (a city in modern-day Nigeria) or Zanzibar, where...
FIGURES
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Journal Article

“Return of the Native”: Sterling Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South and the Work of Signifying Ethnography

Sonnet Retman
American Literature (2014) 86 (1): 87–115.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2395528
Published: 01 March 2014
.... 2008 . “ Sterling Brown’s Southern Strategy: Poetry as Cultural Evolution in Southern Road .” In Tidwell and Tracy ( 2008 , 193 – 207 ). Barnes Deborah . 1998 . “ ‘The Elephant and the Race Problem’: Sterling A. Brown and Arthur P. Davis as Cultural Conservators .” In Rowell ( 1998...
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Journal Article

Racial Abstraction and Species Difference: Anthropomorphic Animals in “Multicultural” Children’s Literature

Leslie Bow
American Literature (2019) 91 (2): 323–356.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7529167
Published: 01 June 2019
..., invoking species indigeneity to stand in for human geography: in this world, both the Bengal tiger and the Indian elephant wear turbans. If Scarry’s depiction of animal dress-up avoids overtly racist caricature, the substitution is nevertheless cringe-worthy. As in the campus controversies over Halloween...
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Journal Article

Touching a Button

Lindsay Reckson
American Literature (2016) 88 (1): 31–65.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3453648
Published: 01 March 2016
... Electrocuting an Elephant—which docu- ments the live execution of a circus elephant named Topsy—collapses human and animal death, linking the speed of film to the lethal work of electricity. Invoking the popular minstrel character to position the black/ animal body as simultaneously...
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Journal Article

Loving Gorillas: Segregation Literature, Animality, and Black Liberation

Eve Dunbar
American Literature (2020) 92 (1): 123–149.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8056609
Published: 01 March 2020
...), articulating a reconfiguration of the human beyond man in just one line. Or perhaps we might take Brooks’s poem “Pete at the Zoo,” originally published in The Bean Eaters (1960), in which the speaker wonders at the life of the elephant after the zoo closes. “Does he hunch up, as I do, / Against the dark...
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Journal Article

Antebellum Coral

Michele Currie Navakas
American Literature (2019) 91 (2): 263–293.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7529143
Published: 01 June 2019
... Press . Spicer Joneath . 2016 . “ The Personification of Africa with an Elephant-Head Crest in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603) .” In Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion , edited by Melion Walter S. and Ramakers Bart , 675 – 715 . Leiden : Brill . Spillers...
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Journal Article

Transatlantic Picture Stories: Experiments in the Antebellum American Comic Strip

Alex Beringer
American Literature (2015) 87 (3): 455–488.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3149333
Published: 01 September 2015
... for all nations,” and in doing so simultaneously strokes Oldpot’s ego and reminds him of the dangers he is supposed to be facing. Oldpot’s fron- tiersman self-conception is further deflated for the audience by the illustrations, which render him looking like an elephant or snowman underneath his...
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Journal Article

The Raven and the Sea: The Lost Intertidal World of Eighteenth-Century Ornithology

Sarah Rivett
American Literature 11792427.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11792427
Published: 07 March 2025
...: vii) explains there is no part of the Globe where the Signs of a Deluge more evidently appears than in many Parts of the Northern Continent of America. His evidence is excavated fossil shells and bones of sea animals and elephant teeth, which Catesby s African-descended informants told him came...
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Journal Article

Vagrancy and Comparative Racialization in Huckleberry Finn and “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”

Hsuan L. Hsu
American Literature (2009) 81 (4): 687–717.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-043
Published: 01 December 2009
... Moore, “‘We Feel the Want of Protection’: The Poli- tics of Law and Race in California, 1848–1878,” in Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California, ed. John F. Burns and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press...
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Journal Article

A More “Human(e)” Society? Animal Autobiography and the Shaping of Race, Species, and Gender

Karah M. Mitchell
American Literature (2024) 96 (3): 411–441.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11398671
Published: 01 September 2024
... determining socially acceptable modes of putting animals to death, as in the famous case of “Topsy” (named after Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin ), who was “humanely” electrocuted in 1903 for being a “Bad Elephant”; as Nicole Shukin ( 2009 : 155–56, 158) argues, Topsy, who “was criminalized and sentenced...
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Journal Article

Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the Science of Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes

Dana Seitler
American Literature (2001) 73 (3): 525–562.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-73-3-525
Published: 01 September 2001
... of atavism in Nightwood. Felix’s ‘‘impermissible blood’’ and his son ‘‘born to holy decay’’ (N, 3, 107), Jenny’s imperialist fancy for ‘‘tiny ivory or jade elephants’’ (N, 65), and the startling refer- ence to ‘‘Nikka, the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris’’ (N, 16)—all constitute...
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Journal Article

“A Hideous Monster of the Mind”: American Race Theory in the Early Republic; “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America

Augusta Rohrbach
American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 613–615.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-027
Published: 01 September 2006
... that deals with this spectral African American presence by not dealing with it—or by ‘‘ghettoiz- ing marginalizing, or trivializing it—is never intellectually wise or respon- sible. For in some cases, this black presence is, ironically enough, the white elephant in the room that must be reckoned...
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Journal Article

Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America , expanded edition

Emory Elliott
American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 615–617.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-028
Published: 01 September 2006
... that deals with this spectral African American presence by not dealing with it—or by ‘‘ghettoiz- ing marginalizing, or trivializing it—is never intellectually wise or respon- sible. For in some cases, this black presence is, ironically enough, the white elephant in the room that must be reckoned...
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