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Journal Article
Ghosts of Essentialism: Racial Memory as Epistemological Claim
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American Literature (2009) 81 (2): 361–386.
Published: 01 June 2009
... and cultural critics, race theorists, and, most recently, “postpositivist realists.” Yet academic scholarship continues to read essentialism in ontological terms, as Walter Benn Michaels does. Ontological readings focus attention on the ways in which essentialism involves positing a presocial being who...
Journal Article
Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit
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American Literature (2021) 93 (3): 497–523.
Published: 01 September 2021
... infrastructures intensify racial inequality under terms that do not include race at all. Through a reading of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and other texts, the article develops the term studious deracination to refer to a narrative strategy defined by an evacuated racial consciousness that is used...
Journal Article
Hard-Boiled Literary History: Labor and Style in Fictions of the Culture Industry
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American Literature (2018) 90 (1): 27–54.
Published: 01 March 2018
...Will Norman Abstract In this article I argue for a new understanding of the term hard-boiled by tracing the relationship between literary style and historical shifts in intellectual labor in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Novels representing the culture industry, such as Raymond...
Journal Article
How to Undo the History of Sexuality: Editing Edward Taylor’s Meditations
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American Literature (2018) 90 (4): 753–784.
Published: 01 December 2018
... on the material and intellectual terms of Taylor’s initial critical reception and on the political forces and critical assumptions that bear on those terms. Taylor’s devotional Meditations offer an exemplary case for understanding how many of the ordinary labors associated with recovery and publication...
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Journal Article
Touching a Button
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American Literature (2016) 88 (1): 31–65.
Published: 01 March 2016
... of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison alongside James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man , the essay argues that these texts invite us to recast early twentieth-century black resistance in electrical terms, terms that expose racial violence as a function of technological...
Journal Article
Inventing Queer: Portals, Hauntings, and Other Fantastic Tricks in the Collected Folklore of Joel Chandler Harris and Charles Chesnutt
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American Literature (2017) 89 (1): 1–28.
Published: 01 March 2017
...Don James McLaughlin Abstract Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay attempts to account for a late nineteenth-century genre termed the queer fantastic...
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Journal Article
John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration
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American Literature (2012) 84 (2): 243–271.
Published: 01 June 2012
...Hester Blum In 2007, a Russian submarine planted a titanium flag on the seabed under the North Pole, laying the groundwork for Russia’s claim to Arctic oil and gas resources. Blum’s essay explores the prehistory of Russia’s polar land grab in terms of the influential (if satirized) early-nineteenth...
Journal Article
The Old Men and the “Sea of Masscult”: T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Middlebrow Aesthetics
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American Literature (2012) 84 (1): 151–174.
Published: 01 March 2012
...Thomas Gordon Perrin Perrin's essay examines the late work of Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot, both accused of having descended into “middlebrow” territory during the post—World War II years when the term was most in vogue. Perrin argues that Eliot's and Hemingway's middlebrow work develops...
Journal Article
“Just Like Home”: Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the New Deal
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American Literature (2014) 86 (1): 61–86.
Published: 01 March 2014
... the history of sentimental and domestic discourse in the United States and the pivotal role that discourse played in the formation of a two-track US welfare state. Attentive to the racist effects of the New Deal’s long-term provisions for African Americans, Wright’s novel gives us the story of a marginal man...
Journal Article
The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel
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American Literature (2015) 87 (1): 51–77.
Published: 01 March 2015
... by white, male Americans who fought in the war, reported on the war, or had some other ties to the US military. Work of this phase renders the Korean War in terms of the bipolar global imaginary dictated by the Cold War: even as this imaginary is ultimately unsuitable for capturing the complexities...
Journal Article
Richard Wright's Oneiropolitics
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American Literature (2010) 82 (1): 151–179.
Published: 01 March 2010
... narrative Black Power , Wright figures the movement of decolonization in terms of dreaming and waking. Here, his engagement with oneirocriticism continues the work of the postcolonial and African diasporic writers who have been drawn to Shakespeare's Caliban in their efforts to conceptualize (post...
Journal Article
Mary Rowlandson's Hunger and the Historiography of Sexuality
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American Literature (2009) 81 (3): 469–495.
Published: 01 September 2009
... of hunger in Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God , serve as the essay's principal case study. The essay argues that rethinking the history of sexuality in terms of the cultivation of sensations forces a reconsideration of the archives from which examples of pre...
Journal Article
With, Without, Even Still: Frederick Douglass, L’Union , and Editorship Studies
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American Literature (2022) 94 (2): 245–272.
Published: 01 June 2022
... at L’Union (a bilingual, Black Creole weekly in New Orleans). These examples reveal the practical language of editorship expressed through serial formats. By reading editing on its own terms, in the patterns of established formats and formal innovations, it becomes possible to envision the broader study...
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Journal Article
The Mystery of the Missing AIDS Crisis: A Comparative Reading of Caper in the Castro and Murder on Main Street
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American Literature (2022) 94 (1): 49–71.
Published: 01 March 2022
... which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the “present absence of queerness in video games.” References Borman Andrew . 2018 . “ Game Saves: Preserving the First LGBTQ Electronic Game...
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
...Ann Mikkelsen The work of Anzia Yezierska presents a challenge to early-twentieth-century models of personhood, citizenship, and reading based on common assumptions regarding the nature of sympathy. Yezierska's deployment of what Mikkelsen terms “aesthetic empathy” draws on an emergent discourse...
Journal Article
State Killing, the Stage of Innocence, and The Exonerated
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American Literature (2011) 83 (1): 121–151.
Published: 01 March 2011
... for thinking through the contemporary terms and framework of conversations about state killing. Ryan argues that the play stimulates reform and elicits sympathy by substituting a false rhetoric of universal vulnerability for a more accurate assessment of imprisonment and judicial murder. The attempt to make...
Journal Article
And : Marks, Maps, Media, and the Materiality of Ambrose Bierce’s Style
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American Literature (2013) 85 (4): 629–660.
Published: 01 December 2013
... of literary and media history, drawing attention to what contemporary German media theorists refer to as cultural techniques , a complex term that combines an attention to media with a focus on the elementary techniques (reading, writing, and counting) that historically and logically precede the aesthetic...
Journal Article
Frederick Douglass in 1848
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American Literature (2013) 85 (3): 447–473.
Published: 01 September 2013
...Cody Marrs When revolutions rocked Europe in 1848, Frederick Douglass responded almost immediately by framing these movements across the Atlantic in global terms, connecting class strife in the Old World to the struggle over slavery in the New. Yet he also used the revolts of 1848 long after...
Journal Article
“It’s Good to Be Shifty”: The Local Democracies of Old Southwestern Humor
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American Literature (2013) 85 (2): 273–301.
Published: 01 June 2013
... culture or as reactionary polemics rejecting the impingements of nation, market capitalism, urbanization, or modernity. This essay, instead, reads these fictions in terms of locality and for their articulations of alternative democratic socialities. These socialities, Emerson argues, evidence local...
Journal Article
“Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business”: Poverty, Race, and Horatio Alger’s Newsboy Novels
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American Literature (2022) 94 (3): 473–496.
Published: 01 September 2022
...Emily Gowen Abstract This essay reconsiders literary engagements with the figure of the newsboy in terms of their own ambivalences, critiques, and calls for social reform. Taking Horatio Alger’s dime novels as a primary case study, this piece explores Alger’s sense that the growth of literary...
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