...Arthur Knight © 2011 by Duke University Press 2011 The American Play: 1787–2000. By Marc Robinson. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 2009. x, 405 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $28.00. The Scene of the Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance. By Shane Vogel. Chicago: Univ. of...

... attacks the nativist Thoreau Book Reviews 193 for playing Indian and claiming to be an egalitarian abolitionist. It nails Stowe for sentimentalizing African Americans while endorsing colonization. Even Moby-Dick—which Powell reads as the conflict...

... of himself as “well qualified to teach that great mystery, creative writing” (36). While he aspires to write a play, Jack finds himself haunted by the specter of mercenary genre fiction, just as King ( 2006 ) unwittingly found himself classed as a writer of horror. Lines from Edgar Allan Poe, the...

... by studying how children learned in the colonial (and for Crain, nineteenth- century) United States, and with the help of what books. Copiously illustrated and beautifully produced, Crain’s The Story of A is a pleasure to hold, look at, and read. Playful and allusive in her treatment of texts...

...Stephen Knadler Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects . By Stephanie Li . New York : Oxford Univ. Press . 2015 . 299 pp. Cloth, $73.00 ; e-book available. Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World . By Cassander...

...Habiba Ibrahim Duke University Press 2006 Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism . By Henry B. Wonham. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2004. viii, 196 pp. $47.50. Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture . By Martha Jane Nadell...

... other territories of the Americas should not be neglected; it is an important part of the larger picture of the forced migration of people of Afri- can descent across the Americas over several generations, and of the roles these people played in the development of numerous societies. Walter John...

...Ann Keniston Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture . By Keyser Catherine . New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers Univ. Press . 2010 . xii, 225 pp. $39.95 . Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright . By Irr Caren . Iowa City...

...Ralph James Savarese Ralph James Savarese , author of one book and editor of three collections, teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa. He spent the academic year 2012–2013 as a neurohumanities fellow at Duke's Institute for Brain Sciences. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The...

...Katy Ryan Ryan's essay analyzes the coordination of the innocence argument and sentimentality in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's The Exonerated (2003), a documentary play based on interviews with people sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. The play's composition, performance, and...

... centrality of the protagonist, we find that the humor in the scene of Peter and the painkiller occurs as the result of an unremarked-on layering of two distinct forms of play: Tom’s play with the cat and the narrator’s playful—more ludic—rendering of the cat’s movement. While the picture of Tom’s play with...

... and parodies the production of the mediagenic fantasy it reflects in the aftermath of the Italo-Ethiopian War. By allowing the signifying “colored empire” full play in the black imagination, Black Empire affords a deeper understanding of the objectives of mid-1930s black internationalism. © 2010 by...

...Monika Barbara Siebert Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe's 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts at...

... antebellum debates about diet and food commodity consumption. A turn to Sylvester Graham's vegetarian movement, however, shows that far from being divorced from civic concerns, the vegetarian dietary theory driving Thoreau's practices at Walden Pond plays a complicated role in the political design of Walden...

... purely cognitive. The game uses its formal blends and its play mechanics to complicate how history is typically thought and to imagine how it might be engaged or processed differently. Ultimately, Braid interrogates the impulses that drive videogames and the historical subjects that they produce...

...Jeffrey H. Richards David Humphreys's 1790 play, The Widow of Malabar , has been little studied, but it demonstrates surprising complexity as a cultural artifact of the American new republic. Written as a close adaptation of Antoine-Marin Lemierre's La Veuve du Malabar (1770), Humphreys's version...

...David H. Evans Grotesque or damaged bodies play a central role in a number of Flannery O'Connor's most powerful stories. One route for interpreting their significance is to approach them by way of a rare psychological condition that has been named apotemnophilia. Apotemnophiliacs experience an...

... histories in which sign talk played a significant role. © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 Kay The Moccasin Telegraph: Sign-Talk Yandell Autobiography and Pretty-­shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows Over several cold and windy days in March...

... movement among different sites of black revolutionary struggle. In this context, jazz plays an explicitly political role in expressing the revolutionary desire for black liberation in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. This is most evident in the opening mood of Ask Your Mama , “Cultural...