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Journal Article
The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form
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American Literature (2018) 90 (3): 657–660.
Published: 01 September 2018
...-book available. Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press 2018 In these three works, fraught mobilities, precarious senses of belonging, and alternative social forms emerge and recede against the backdrop of a homogenizing yet nonhomogeneous United States. Informed by sociological theory (Christopher C...
View articletitled, The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic American Road Narratives: Reimagining <span class="search-highlight">Mobility</span> in Literature and Film Site Reading: Fiction, Art, <span class="search-highlight">Social</span> Form
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for article titled, The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic American Road Narratives: Reimagining <span class="search-highlight">Mobility</span> in Literature and Film Site Reading: Fiction, Art, <span class="search-highlight">Social</span> Form
Journal Article
Market Nation: Forging Economic Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century African America
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American Literature (2024) 96 (4): 607–641.
Published: 01 December 2024
..., African Americans formulated an ideal of economic citizenship that translated Black material successes and social mobility into an extra-legal symbolic citizenship; in particular, class stratification among African Americans was mobilized to counter the presumption of immutable, ontological Black...
Journal Article
The Age of Anxiety: Patricia Highsmith, Existential Psychology, and the “Decline” Of American Naturalism
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American Literature (2015) 87 (4): 769–798.
Published: 01 December 2015
... become the dominant template for understanding society and the self. Patricia Highsmith's novels provide a nodal point for this political and intellectual history as she recasts representations of violence, murder, alienation, class envy, and social mobility in ways that both represent and helped define...
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
... on interpretations of minority mobility. Bildungsroman hermeneutics understands social relations as organized around individual development. This model undermines the collective politics many critics sense in Cisneros’s text and obscures her revisions of the genre. Furthermore, bildungsroman hermeneutics intersects...
Journal Article
Contraband Singing: Poems and Songs in Circulation during the Civil War
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American Literature (2010) 82 (2): 271–304.
Published: 01 June 2010
...Michael C. Cohen Cohen excavates the social history of the contraband song, a genre of poetry and music popular during the American Civil War. Written in the voices of “contrabands,” former slaves living under the protection of the Union army, contraband songs emerged in the intersections...
Journal Article
From Sympathy to Empathy: Anzia Yezierska and the Transformation of the American Subject
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American Literature (2010) 82 (2): 361–388.
Published: 01 June 2010
... constituted by economically, socially, and culturally mobile, not to mention aesthetically pleasing, bodies. Both Jewish and American, these bodies serve as touchpoints for their own desiring gazes, positing a model of assimilative empathy for “native” and immigrant alike in which “looks” refer to both an act...
Journal Article
Gaming Borders: The Rhetorics of Gamification and National Belonging in Papers, Please
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American Literature (2022) 94 (1): 181–209.
Published: 01 March 2022
... dimensions of one’s play experience. There is perhaps nothing more American than this. In moments like these, Papers, Please reveals how gamification mobilizes procedural models of social difference as a mechanic that modulates play within dominant notions of nationhood and political representation...
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Journal Article
Rescued Children and Unfit Mothers: Dreiser’s Social Work in the Delineator ’s Child-Rescue Campaign
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American Literature (2017) 89 (1): 57–89.
Published: 01 March 2017
...Emily Hainze Abstract This essay explores the 1907–11 Child-Rescue Campaign run by the Delineator , a fashion magazine for women edited by Theodore Dreiser. I argue that the campaign mobilized social science to reconceptualize maternity as based in affective expertise rather than biological...
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View articletitled, Rescued Children and Unfit Mothers: Dreiser’s <span class="search-highlight">Social</span> Work in the Delineator ’s Child-Rescue Campaign
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Journal Article
Black Hairdresser and Social Critic: Eliza Potter and the Labors of Femininity
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American Literature (2005) 77 (1): 151–177.
Published: 01 March 2005
..., participation
in the upper classes was perceived as contingent on one’s unques-
tionable social standing, the nation’s commercial embrace of norms
for social mobility now made wealth the only determinant. In this
new context of myriad, unreliable appearances, Potter’s expert gaze
exposes the theatricality...
Journal Article
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence” F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Scene
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American Literature (2019) 91 (4): 886–888.
Published: 01 December 2019
.... Berman underscores how Fitzgerald’s characters reflect the nation’s concerns, rhythms, and tendencies from the 1910s across the 1920s. The 1920s Jazz Age, he reminds us, relied on and extended aspects of the previous decade—the emergence of the motor car, jazz music, economic and social mobility...
Journal Article
Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
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American Literature (2019) 91 (2): 420–422.
Published: 01 June 2019
... change,” usually reassuring readers that schooling would not promote social mobility (22). For example, many common school narratives depict children declaiming selections of poetry, classical orations, and political speeches without apparent comprehension as an argument for textbook materials more...
View articletitled, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
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for article titled, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Journal Article
Naturalism's Nation: Toward An American Tragedy
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American Literature (2000) 72 (1): 153–180.
Published: 01 March 2000
...-dream’’ of economic mobility
to the ‘‘reality’’ of social Darwinism, An American Tragedy begins to
thematize a new narrative economy based on spectacular relationships
and the value of visibility within them...
Journal Article
Restaging the Racial Contract: James Weldon Johnson's Signatory Strategies
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American Literature (2002) 74 (1): 31–58.
Published: 01 March 2002
... citizenship, from the ways in which he is denied status as
privatepropertyowner.11 Indeed, Johnson recognizes how agents of
restrictive covenants and Jim Crow legislation work to preclude unre-
stricted mobility through the social landscape of New York. For John-
son, then, New York does not represent...
Journal Article
Ethnic Plotting: Henry Harland and the Jewish Writer
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American Literature (2003) 75 (1): 119–140.
Published: 01 March 2003
... can be seen as the meeting point of cultural production
and the drama of class and social mobility that the literary market
appeared to him to broker.
Harland had great hopes for TheYokeoftheThorah,anovelcon...
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
... norms around masculinity, social mobility, and patriotism. The genre “demands agreement, homogeneity, [and] consensus” because it both reflects and builds a national culture (Moretti 1987 : 15). Like other authors of color, 5 Asian American writers have often deployed the bildungsroman...
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Journal Article
Periodizing Authorship, Characterizing Genre: Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Benevolent Literacy Narratives
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American Literature (2004) 76 (1): 1–29.
Published: 01 March 2004
... described as the ongoing con-
struction process for social class (NPC, 144, 148–49)—in this case, the
discursive mobilization of a national, maternal teaching class.
Meanwhile, however, because domestic literacy narratives over-
generalized an ideal of maternal pedagogy, they ignored ways in which...
Journal Article
“Indelicate Exposure”: Sentiment and Law in Fall River: An Authentic Narrative
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American Literature (2002) 74 (2): 373–401.
Published: 01 June 2002
... and revivalists underscore sentimentalism’s investment
in class and gender hierarchy. The mobility of both threatened the sen-
timental ideals of the patriarchal family and its domestic harmony as
foundational aspects of a stable social structure.11
The anxieties about social order expressed in Fall River...
Journal Article
Langston Hughes’s Constructivist Poetics
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American Literature (2018) 90 (3): 585–612.
Published: 01 September 2018
... and social mobility; it was undercut, of course, by the system of forced labor on which the nation’s economic prowess and capitalist accumulation rested. Hughes satirized this ideology in his early poetry. In “Elevator Boy” from Fine Clothes to the Jew , for example, the eponymous speaker’s only glimpse...
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Journal Article
The Talking Book in the Secondary Classroom: Reading as a Promise of Freedom in the Era of Neoliberal Education Reform
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American Literature (2017) 89 (2): 355–377.
Published: 01 June 2017
...” charter schools make their choice: students succeed by will alone. Critics of “no excuses” decry a blindness to the structural issues that prevent social mobility, an air of corporate endorsement with hints of right-wing defenses for the meritocratic social order, a gorging on teaching labor whose workers...
Journal Article
The Critical DREAMer Memoir: Educational Mobility and the Limits of Meritocratic Citizenship
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American Literature (2023) 95 (1): 29–58.
Published: 01 March 2023
... education undocumented In the most widely read memoir of Latinx literature, Hunger of Memory , Richard Rodriguez ( 1982 ) formulates an enduring vision of educational mobility. 1 Rehearsing a familiar ascendant arc of a “scholarship boy” (4), beginning as a “socially disadvantaged” (1) child...
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View articletitled, The Critical DREAMer Memoir: Educational <span class="search-highlight">Mobility</span> and the Limits of Meritocratic Citizenship
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