..., $49.95; paper, $19.95. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. . By Kevin Floyd. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 2009. 270 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $25.00. Shane Vogel The New Queer Essentialism The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. By...

...John J. Su Su calls for a reexamination of essentialism in light of a resurging interest in identity and identity politics. Since the mid-1990s, poststructuralist dismissals of identity as “pernicious and metaphysically inaccurate” have increasingly been challenged by feminist philosophers and...

... expression but instead deems silence to be essential in the construction of a black commonplace. Baraka posits three interrelated forms of black silence: the silence of oppression, the silence of resistance, and the silence of social optimism. In the perceived absence of expression, the poems from The Dead...

...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...

...Sari Edelstein This essay draws attention to how the institutionalization of childhood studies in American literary criticism unwittingly privileges youth over all other ages and reifies the stages of life themselves as essential categories rather than as cultural constructs. Given that age emerged...

... increase in college enrollment over the past century, America's most influential educational institutions largely serve the same social classes as they did in the past, and largely for the same reasons. The essential difference is that while the benefits of higher education were once understood as form of...

... Literature produced during Carol’s tenure answered to her exacting standards, which were buoyed by that essential suppleness that prevents rigidity. Sometimes an influence becomes a legacy. Carol continues to teach us how to produce a journal worthy of its readers. The Editors and Staff, past and...

... MacGuffin of race might be. Nowhere in the book is there consideration that race may be a cultural fiction without essential properties. Rather, the assumption throughout seems to be that race marks out an immutable and ontologically given fact about a person. One option seems to be that Huh is adopting...

... men who rise above trauma to the perceived degenerate sexuality and moral weakness of conscientious objectors and other male outliers. Keen to argue for the importance of Ward’s novels to literary history, Dodman argues that, however essentializing they may be, they merit our attention now because...

..., 59). Woolman uses a child to argue that the ‘‘false’’ belief in essential racial difference that ‘‘through the force of long cus- tom’’ has been used to justify slavery undermines the colonies’ abiding commitment to ‘‘liberty’’ (CKN, 58–59). Over a hundred years later, as the nation went to war to...

.... While Wheelock engages religious discourses on slavery, Andrea Stone’s Black Well-Being explores the language of medicine and law, examining a later set of writers who hypothesized abolition as an essential corrective to ensure social well-being and ethical prosperity. Stone begins by providing the...

... of their contributions, and all should be considered essential reading for critics of postwar American culture. Daniel Grausam, Durham University DOI 10.1215/00029831-2400415 Unspeakable Violence: Remapping US and Mexican National Imaginaries. By Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández. Durham, NC...

... openly confronting white supremacist physical and discursive violence as well as Black Power ideals of essential subjectivity. In short, Rushdy secures neo- slave narratives their own intellectual ground, an adept move that, it seems...

...- tives undertake distinctly different issues of critique, with neoslave narratives openly confronting white supremacist physical and discursive violence as well as Black Power ideals of essential subjectivity. In short, Rushdy secures neo...

... Alcott’s novel Work (1873) and its chapter on Christie Devon’s experience as an actress. Nevertheless, Ackerman’s book is essential reading for unpacking (to use a James metaphor exploited brilliantly by the author...

... Grass’’ (1983) in discussing the speech-act dimension of Whitman’s poetry or Louisa May Alcott’s novel Work (1873) and its chapter on Christie Devon’s experience as an actress. Nevertheless, Ackerman’s book is essential reading...

... altogether. Still, Quinney’s book will be essential reading for all future critics seek- ing to assemble the romantic-modernist-postmodernist lineage. In an age of obligatory demystification, the presentation of so...

..., dazzle, and deliberate deflation is another thing altogether. Still, Quinney’s book will be essential reading for all future critics seek- ing to assemble the romantic-modernist-postmodernist lineage. In an age...

... tragic fate loom ominously over James, and who, not surprisingly, figures promi- nently in both Haralson’s and Person’s books. When exploring James’s subtle linkage of sexual identity and epistemology, which would prove essential to the modernist project, Haralson offers one of his most rewarding...