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Journal Article
Bildungsroman Hermeneutics in the Post–Civil Rights Era
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American Literature (2018) 90 (1): 141–170.
Published: 01 March 2018
... the bildungsroman (including the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Naylor), Cisneros’s text can help us do so, if we can learn to read it otherwise. Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press 2018 Sandra Cisneros Latina/o literature social mobility ethnic community protagonist A problem...
Journal Article
Shocking Therapy: Narrating Racism’s Psychobiological Injuries in Ralph Ellison’s Factory Hospital
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American Literature (2024) 96 (2): 241–267.
Published: 01 June 2024
...Cera Smith Abstract Taking seriously Ralph Ellison’s interest in the sympathetic nervous system and his involvement in the Black hospital movement, this article demonstrates how the protagonist’s pain in Invisible Man ’s factory hospital scene influences the narrator’s writerly “choices...
Journal Article
The Anti- corrido of George Washington Gómez: A Narrative of Emergent Subject Formation
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American Literature (2008) 80 (1): 111–140.
Published: 01 March 2008
... of these totalizing narratives of subject formation, leaving the protagonist in a condition of fragmentation. In Paredes's late and peripheral version of modernism, such fragmentation is always rooted firmly in social and political contexts, suggesting that in the borderlands, totalizing scripts of identity collide...
Journal Article
The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism: Robert Herrick’s The Web of Life and the Political Economy of Health Care at the Turn of the Century
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American Literature (2014) 86 (3): 583–610.
Published: 01 September 2014
..., trusts, and corporations. The book presents the competition between these alternative paradigms by following the shifting career choices and internal conflicts of its protagonist, Dr. Howard Sommers, as he strives to satisfy his own vision—at times itself contradictory—of medical professionalism...
View articletitled, The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism: Robert Herrick’s The Web of Life and the Political Economy of Health Care at the Turn of the Century
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Journal Article
The Postsecular Turn and Muslim American Literature
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American Literature (2014) 86 (4): 799–829.
Published: 01 December 2014
..., Kahf uses the formal strategies of the bildungsroman to contest the moral superiority of secular feminism and to assert an Islamic feminism that works in tandem with American identity. She situates her protagonist’s ultimate independence from the family fold, patriarchal Islam, and mainstream US...
Journal Article
Impostors of Freedom: Southern White Manhood, Hypodermic Morphine, and E. P. Roe's Without a Home
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American Literature (2008) 80 (3): 527–554.
Published: 01 September 2008
... time, the temperance plot was updated to include the idea that such habituations might be nervous illnesses afflicting modern professional workers. Through its addicted protagonist Martin Jocelyn, Roe's novel engages these unevenly developing medical, reform, and popular early representations...
Journal Article
Reconsidering Lost Opportunities for Diverse Representation
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American Literature (2022) 94 (1): 73–102.
Published: 01 March 2022
.... While Ellison’s story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a “lost opportunity” for exploring gay identity...
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Journal Article
Archipelagic Diaspora, Geographical Form, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
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American Literature (2013) 85 (1): 121–149.
Published: 01 March 2013
... Their Eyes 's creation of the horizon-space that Janie, the novel's protagonist, uses to animate her geographical search for the unpresentable. Attentiveness to the novel's varied reliances on insular and archipelagic forms helps make accessible Their Eyes 's investments in critiquing and ironizing...
Journal Article
Aztlán’s Asians: Forging and Forgetting Cross-Racial Relations in the Chicana/O Literary Imagination
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American Literature (2013) 85 (3): 563–589.
Published: 01 September 2013
... in narratives that articulate Chicana/o political identities. In these texts, Asia and Asians provoke powerful political awakenings because transnational and interracial ideas about Asia and Asians factor significantly in the political emergence of their respective Chicana/o protagonists. However, by relegating...
Journal Article
Transparent Citizenship: The Racialization of Privacy in Post–World War II Japanese American Fiction
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American Literature (2024) 96 (4): 521–545.
Published: 01 December 2024
... was contingent upon enforced transparency to the broader suspicion of the more generalized “Oriental” as a figure whose opacity becomes an excuse for racialized surveillance and policing in the name of national security. As formerly interned or imprisoned individuals, Yamamoto’s and Okada’s protagonists begin...
Journal Article
All Hail Cthulhu! On Lovecraft, Monstress , and Asian American Bildung
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American Literature (2025) 97 (1): 155–184.
Published: 01 March 2025
... that the protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, represents a novel model of ethnic identity formation, one whose arranged marriage to a Lovecraftian demon and war against state institutions critique passive integration into a structurally racist society. The result is a hero for a new generation of readers who codifies racial...
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Journal Article
“what Is Your Mother’s Name?”: Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in Black Nationalist Literature
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American Literature (2016) 88 (3): 477–507.
Published: 01 September 2016
...’ nationalist imaginings, one perhaps most masterfully deployed in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . Invisible Man follows an unnamed protagonist on his quest for identity. After jeopardizing his “scholarship to the state college for Negroes” by offending a white patron (Ellison 1995 , 32...
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Journal Article
The Visual Art of Invisible Man : Ellison's Portrait of Blackness
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American Literature (2009) 81 (4): 775–803.
Published: 01 December 2009
... perspective that spawned the novel Invisible Man (1952).
My essay demonstrates that examining Ellison’s interest in visual art
recovers a critical tool for analyzing his protagonist’s journey from
idealizing a simple, realistic notion of identity to appreciating a more
complicated, abstract...
Journal Article
“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature
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American Literature (2020) 92 (4): 623–652.
Published: 01 December 2020
... at a formal level; Du Bois renders the narrator epiphenomenal within his own narrative, given that unlike the voice of the white woman, his speech is unpunctuated; the lack of quotation marks for the usher, whose race is undisclosed, aligns him with the protagonist. A fourth invisible character then enters...
Journal Article
The “Mysteries and Miseries” of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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American Literature (2001) 73 (2): 277–309.
Published: 01 June 2001
... influenced, Jacobs’s critique of
the position of her slave protagonist under Southern law.17
As antislavery activists and writers turned toward the formulas of
the urban gothic, a new genre of abolitionist narrative emerged...
View articletitled, The “Mysteries and Miseries” of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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Journal Article
Authentic-Deconstructionist Games and Tragic Historiography in Assassin’s Creed III
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American Literature (2022) 94 (1): 133–158.
Published: 01 March 2022
... commenters on Reddit and the YouTube trailer did mention the protagonist’s ethnicity, it was mostly to voice the cautious hope that this would make the game less one-sided rather than to attack liberals for a woke assault on traditional American culture. These responses raise some interesting questions: Why...
Journal Article
Dr. Gonzo's Carnival: The Testimonial Satires of Oscar Zeta Acosta
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American Literature (2000) 72 (3): 463–494.
Published: 01 September 2000
... grotesque testimonios present his autobiographical
protagonists as imperfect individuals; through their faults as well as
their virtues, these figures allow us to see the truths of the revolution
about which he wrote...
Journal Article
The Information Isolation Trope: Isolation, Infection, and Information Silos in Early American Literature
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American Literature (2024) 96 (3): 325–353.
Published: 01 September 2024
... fiction the information isolation trope . This trope typically contains at least four subplots. The first is the seclusion motif, wherein the antagonist isolates the protagonist from family and friends, thereby making their rescue improbable. The bubble facilitates the ways in which the antagonist...
Journal Article
Octavia E. Butler How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production
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American Literature (2018) 90 (4): 873–875.
Published: 01 December 2018
... . . . to show the radical embeddedness of the past within the present” (61) in which the protagonist is drawn “into deeper and deeper complicity with the horrible past of slavery” (63). In order to safeguard her own existence, Kindred’ s protagonist must protect her slave-owning ancestor whose behavior becomes...
Journal Article
“Alive in Every Fibre”: Chopin and Wharton on Pain, Pleasure, and Private Feeling
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American Literature (2024) 96 (2): 213–240.
Published: 01 June 2024
... to certain elite white female subjects. 4 In a sense, we could say that the private sphere traditionally and prescriptively associated with leisured white women is reconfigured in their works as an inviolate realm secured deep within their privileged white female protagonists. We could also view...
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