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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
... in an information silo once she is cut off from communicating with all family and friends who might save her, and then she, like Charlotte, grows sick from an unnamed disease (Foster 1996 : 204–25) and dies after giving birth (236). 1 Charles Brockden Brown’s novels complicate the trope but incorporate...
View articletitled, The Information Isolation <span class="search-highlight">Trope</span>: Isolation, Infection, and Information Silos in Early American Literature
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Journal Article
“My Whole Life I’ve Been on the Run”: Fugitivity as a Postracial Trope in Red Dead Redemption 2
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American Literature (2022) 94 (1): 159–179.
Published: 01 March 2022
... maintains that fugitivity operates as a rhetorical trope that stands in for racial identity where the logic of postracialism denies investments in race. Analyzing the narrative, spatial, and kinesthetic elements of the game, this article argues that Morgan, and by extension the player, is aligned...
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View articletitled, “My Whole Life I’ve Been on the Run”: Fugitivity as a Postracial <span class="search-highlight">Trope</span> in Red Dead Redemption 2
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Journal Article
Unquiet Tropes: Form, Race, and Asian American Literature Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday
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American Literature (2016) 88 (4): 859–862.
Published: 01 December 2016
... possibilities. Unquiet Tropes insists on a transformative rather than an additive mode of reading. Tsou does not simply read formal rhetoric as ancillary to these works but asks us to fundamentally reconceive Asian American literature as “a set of rhetorical tropes taking shape around highly specific...
View articletitled, Unquiet <span class="search-highlight">Tropes</span>: Form, Race, and Asian American Literature Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday
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for article titled, Unquiet <span class="search-highlight">Tropes</span>: Form, Race, and Asian American Literature Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday
Journal Article
The Race of Machines: Blackness and Prosthetics in Early American Science Fiction
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American Literature (2018) 90 (3): 553–584.
Published: 01 September 2018
...Taylor Evans Abstract The steam man is a trope of early US science fiction, one inaugurated by the first dime novel Edisonade, Edward Ellis’s 1868 story The Steam Man of the Prairies . Focusing on early steam man stories as well as the historical origin of the trope—Zadoc Dederick’s 1868 invention...
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Journal Article
The Biology of Intimacy: Lamarckian Evolution and the Sentimental Novel
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American Literature (2020) 92 (3): 457–484.
Published: 01 September 2020
... heroines of domestic plots not only function as tropes of domestic and national belonging, as has been widely recognized, but also of population regulation at the biological level of species. Sentimentalism functions as a mode of evolutionary theory, one that articulated the Lamarckian belief that sensory...
Journal Article
Melville in the Customhouse Attic
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American Literature (2010) 82 (2): 305–332.
Published: 01 June 2010
... for the deepening and darkening of Melville's work: the apparent realization of U.S. “Manifest Destiny” in 1848, with a massive territorial conquest from Mexico. Hager explores the political implications of Redburn 's spatial tropes, paying special attention to the architectural history of the New York customhouse...
Journal Article
Sleeping at Walden Pond: Thoreau, Abnormal Temporality, and the Modern Body
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American Literature (2013) 85 (1): 5–31.
Published: 01 March 2013
...Benjamin Reiss This essay explores Henry David Thoreau's Walden in relation to the history of sleep, considered as a medical, biological, social, and spiritual phenomenon. Attention to Thoreau's striving for “awakening” and “alertness” has veiled his running rhetoric of dormancy: scenes and tropes...
Journal Article
“Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!” Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America
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American Literature (2011) 83 (2): 355–388.
Published: 01 June 2011
... the concept of “popular fantasy” to describe how tropes of literary enchantment are deployed to make sense of emergent real-world social and political relations. Through a close reading of the X-Men in the mid-to-late 1970s, Fawaz shows how the comic book visually absorbed the cultural politics of the women's...
Journal Article
Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass's “The Heroic Slave”
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American Literature (2009) 81 (1): 127–152.
Published: 01 March 2009
...). The trope's polemical function is especially apparent when it is contrasted retrospectively with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), in which nature is a paralyzing wilderness rather than a theater of self-emancipation. Ecocriticism has failed so far to engage...
Journal Article
Drowning (in) Kittens: The Reproduction of Girlhood in Victorian America
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American Literature (2014) 86 (2): 305–331.
Published: 01 June 2014
...Elizabeth Barnes Following Donna Haraway’s concept of the “killable” animal in When Species Meet , this essay looks at the social conditions and literary conventions that render ostensibly “priceless” objects, like pets and children, disposable in the Victorian period. Through the Victorian trope...
Journal Article
The Paris Paradox: Colorblindness and Colonialism in African American Expatriate Fiction
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American Literature (2015) 87 (4): 739–768.
Published: 01 December 2015
... love songs to racially liberal Paris to William Gardner Smith's shrewd attack on French colonialism, the trope of interracial romance undergirds both the construction and the questioning of a colorblind Paris. I argue that as African American expatriate writers included North African characters...
Journal Article
Black Feminist Geohaptics and the Broken Earth
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American Literature (2023) 95 (3): 569–596.
Published: 01 September 2023
... trilogy, the article considers how ecological touch—or what Erin Robinsong calls geohaptics —emerges as a central literary trope that imagines new forms of sensory wayfinding and worldmaking that unearth and contest the epoch’s racial ecologies of power. Expanding the concept’s uses and forms, what...
Journal Article
American Literature (2024) 96 (2): 187–212.
Published: 01 June 2024
... before turning to hospital accounts by Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman that adopt the trope of portraiture in order to make soldiers’ suffering legible to a wider audience. This essay argues that these ekphrastic accounts make visible not only soldiers’ suffering but also the act of observing...
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
...” in the novel’s frame narrative. Scholarship on the novel thoroughly attends to the trope of the protagonist’s invisibility but regularly overlooks his corporeal presence. Invisible Man experiences social invisibility, not as a metaphor but as an embodied, somatic state initiated through racializing violence...
Journal Article
Revolutionary Worldmaking: James Monroe Whitfield’s Poems in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America
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American Literature (2025) 97 (1): 1–36.
Published: 01 March 2025
... violence against the oppressor, the affect of outrage that sutures individuals into a volatile collective, and the rhetorical tropes of collectively voiced apostrophe, exclamation, and rhetorical question. While Blake reframes Whitfield’s poems as inspiration for the fictionalized Cuban liberation movement...
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Journal Article
“Rightly Enough Called Girls”: Melville’s Violated Virgins and Male Marketplace Fears
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American Literature (2018) 90 (1): 55–82.
Published: 01 March 2018
... conversations in which men interpreted women’s labor in relation to an increasingly outdated framework for their activities, here termed the patriarchal shelter . This trope presumes that women’s activities ought to take place under conditions found in the preindustrial household and helps to explain why male...
Journal Article
Under Description: The Fugitive Slave Advertisement as Genre
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American Literature (2020) 92 (1): 61–89.
Published: 01 March 2020
... to identify, explain, and anticipate slaves’ behavior in the antebellum era, constructing an implicit model of enslaved personhood by means of consistent syntactic patterns and semantic tropes. I argue for the continuity of these texts’ descriptive and scriptive (or instructive) functions, finding that FSAs...
Journal Article
Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels
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American Literature (2021) 93 (3): 445–472.
Published: 01 September 2021
... presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come...
Journal Article
How Do We See COVID-19? Visual Iconographies of Racial Contagion
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American Literature (2020) 92 (4): 707–722.
Published: 01 December 2020
... for unique diseases and display interfaces. The variations among different corpora of contagion media point to the interplay among persistent, transhistorical tropes, particular sites of meaning production, and novel technical affordances. This article will examine a subset of these representational...
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Journal Article
Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre”
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American Literature (2021) 93 (2): 167–194.
Published: 01 June 2021
... and signal emotional connection, in “Le Mulâtre” the carrying of a miniature departs from this trope, marking alienation, not affiliation. Reading Séjour’s text against popular depictions and material histories of ivory portrait miniatures, I demonstrate that these familiar objects of eighteenth...
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