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Rutgers University PressMain Street and Empire : The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization
Ryan Poll
Bringing together a broad selection of texts—from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, and Peter Weir's The Truman Show to the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama—Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism. -
UVA PressThe New Death : American Modernism and World War I
Pearl James
Adopting the term "new death," which was used to describe the unprecedented and horrific scale of death caused by the First World War, Pearl James uncovers several touchstones of American modernism that refer to and narrate traumatic death. The sense of paradox was pervasive: death was both sanctified and denied; notions of heroism were both essential and far-fetched; and civilians had opportunities to hear about the ugliness of death at the front but often preferred not to. By historicizing and analyzing the work of such writers as Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, the author shows how their novels reveal, conceal, refigure, and aestheticize the violent death of young men in the aftermath of the war. These writers, James argues, have much to say about how the First World War changed death's cultural meaning. -
UVA PressUpon Provincialism : Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900
Bill Hardwig
Drawing on tourist literature, travelogues, and local-color fiction about the South, Bill Hardwig tracks the ways in which the nation's leading interdisciplinary periodicals, especially the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the Century, translated and broadcast the predominant narratives about the late-nineteenth-century South. In many ways, he attests, the national representation of the South was controlled more firmly by periodical editors working in the Northeast, such as William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Richard Watson Gilder, than by writers living in and writing about the region. Fears about national unity, immigration, industrialization, and racial dynamics in the South could be explored through the safe and displaced realm of a regional literature that was often seen as mere entertainment or as a picturesque depiction of quaint rural life. The author examines in depth the short work of George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lafcadio Hearn, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Thomas Nelson Page in the context of the larger periodical investment in the South. Arguing that this local-color fiction calls into question some of the lines of demarcation within U.S. and southern literary and cultural studies, especially those offered by identity-based models, Hardwig returns these writers to the dynamic cultural exchanges within local-color fiction from which they initially emerged. -
UVA PressFamily Matters : Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland
Marisel C. Moreno
Adopting a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to Puerto Rican literature, Marisel Moreno juxtaposes narratives by insular and U.S. Puerto Rican women authors in order to examine their convergences and divergences. By showing how these writers use the trope of family to question the tenets of racial and social harmony, an idealized past, and patriarchal authority that sustain the foundational myth of la gran familia, she argues that this metaphor constitutes an overlooked literary contact zone between narratives from both sides. Moreno proposes the recognition of a "transinsular" corpus to reflect the increasingly transnational character of the Puerto Rican population and addresses the need to broaden the literary canon in order to include the diaspora. Drawing on the fields of historiography, cultural studies, and gender studies, the author defies the tendency to examine these literary bodies independently of one another and therefore aims to present a more nuanced and holistic vision of this literature. -
UVA PressActivism and the American Novel : Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color
Channette Romero
Since the 1980s, many activists and writers have turned from identity politics toward ethnic religious traditions to rediscover and reinvigorate their historic role in resistance to colonialism and oppression. In her examination of contemporary fiction by women of color—including Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, Toni Cade Bambara, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko—Channette Romero considers the way these novels newly engage with Vodun, Santería, Candomblé, and American Indian traditions. Critical of a widespread disengagement from civic participation and of the contemporary novel’s disconnection from politics, this fiction attempts to transform the novel and the practice of reading into a means of political engagement and an inspiration for social change. -
UVA PressRalph Ellison and Kenneth Burke : At the Roots of the Racial Divide
Bryan Crable
Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke focuses on the little-known but important friendship between two canonical American writers. The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than literary biography; Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American "racial divide." Through examination of published writings and unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most important works, including Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and Ellison's Invisible Man. In addition, the book connects this dialogue to changes in American discourse about race. Crable shows that these two men were deeply connected, intellectually and personally, but the social division between white and black Americans produced hesitation, embarrassment, mystery, and estrangement where Ellison and Burke might otherwise have found unity. By using Ellison’s nonfiction and Burke’s rhetorical theory to articulate a new vocabulary of race, the author concludes not with a simplistic "healing" of the divide but with a challenge to embrace the responsibility inherent to our social order. -
Fordham University PressThe Sentimental Touch : The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism
Aaron Ritzenberg
The Sentimental Touch explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture. Analyzing novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathanael West, the book demonstrates that sentimental language changes but remains powerful, even in works by authors who self-consciously write against the sentimental tradition. Sentimental language has an afterlife, enduring in American literature long after authors and critics declared it dead, insisting that human feeling can resist a mechanizing culture and embodying, paradoxically, the way that literary conventions themselves become mechanical and systematic. -
Fordham University PressThe Naked Communist : Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture
Roland Végső
The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the "world" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation.The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist "aesthetic ideology." The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program. -
Temple University PressPimping Fictions : African-American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing
Justin Gifford
"Lush sex and stark violence colored Black and served up raw by a great Negro writer," promised the cover of Run Man Run, Chester Himes' pioneering novel in the black crime fiction tradition. In Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. -
Temple University PressBlack Regions of the Imagination : African American Writers between the Nation and the World
Eve Dunbar
Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes have all enlightened mainstream (white) audiences about their race and culture. Focusing on fiction and non-fiction produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Eve Dunbar's important book, Black Regions of the Imagination examines how these African American writers-who lived and travelled outside the United States-both document and re-imagine their "homegrown" racial experiences within a worldly framework. From Hurston's participant-observational accounts and Wrights' travel writing to Baldwin's Another Country and Himes' detective fiction, these writers helped develop the concept of a "region" of blackness that resists boundaries of genre. Each writer represents-and signifies-blackness in new ways and within the larger context of the world. As they negotiated issues of "belonging," these writers disallowed the privileging of the national or the international, and were more critical of social segregation in America as well as their roles as cultural "translators." -
Temple University PressEast Is West and West Is East : Gender, Culture and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America
Karen Kuo
During the interwar years, contact between Asia and America forced a reassessment of the normative boundaries of race, sex, gender, class, home, and nation. Karen Kuo's provocative East Is West and West Is East looks closely at these global shifts to modernity. In her analysis of five forgotten texts - the 1930 film East Is West, Frank Capra's 1937 version of Lost Horizon and its 1973 remake; Younghill Kang's novel East Goes West; and Baroness Ishimoto's memoir/manifesto, Facing Both Ways - Kuo elucidates how "Asia" played a role in shaping American gender and racial identities and how Asian authors understood modern America and its social, political, and cultural influence on Asia. Kuo asserts that while notions of white and Asian racial difference remain salient, sexual and gendered constructions of Asians and whites were at times about similarity and intersections as much as they were about establishing differences. -
UVA PressArtistic Ambassadors : Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era
Brian Russell Roberts
During the first generation of black participation in U.S. diplomacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vibrant community of African American writers and cultural figures worked as U.S. representatives abroad. Through the literary and diplomatic dossiers of figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Archibald and Angelina Grimké, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, and Richard Wright, Brian Roberts shows how the intersection of black aesthetic trends and U.S. political culture both Americanized and internationalized the trope of the New Negro. This decades-long relationship began during the days of Reconstruction, and it flourished as U.S. presidents courted and rewarded their black voting constituencies by appointing black men as consuls and ministers to such locales as Liberia, Haiti, Madagascar, and Venezuela. These appointments changed the complexion of U.S. interactions with nations and colonies of color; in turn, state-sponsored black travel gave rise to literary works that imported international representation into New Negro discourse on aesthetics, race, and African American culture. -
UVA PressWomen’s Work : Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels
Courtney Thorsson
In Women’s Work, Courtney Thorsson reconsiders the gender, genre, and geography of African American nationalism as she explores the aesthetic history of African American writing by women. Building on and departing from the Black Arts Movement, the literary fiction of such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison employs a cultural nationalism—practiced by their characters as "women's work"—that defines a distinct contemporary literary movement, demanding attention to the continued relevance of nation in post–Black Arts writing. Identifying five forms of women's work as organizing, dancing, mapping, cooking, and inscribing, Thorsson shows how these writers reclaimed and revised cultural nationalism to hail African America. -
UVA PressReclaiming Nostalgia : Longing for Nature in American Literature
Jennifer K. Ladino
Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice. -
NYU PressBonds of Citizenship : Law and the Labors of Emancipation
Hoang Gia Phan
In this study of literature and law from the Constitutional founding through the Civil War, Hoang Gia Phan demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. Bonds of Citizenship illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. -
NYU PressRacial Innocence : Performing Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights
Robin Bernstein
Winner of the Outstanding Book Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 2012
Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, New England American Studies Association, 2012
Runner-Up for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, American Studies Association, 2012
Honorable Mention …
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Fordham University PressReconstructing Individualism : A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison
James M. Albrecht
America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. -
Rutgers University PressTransatlantic Spectacles of Race : The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse
Kimberly Manganelli
Manganelli brings together two crucial literary types from opposite sides of the Atlantic, the mixed-race slave in American literature and the Jewish actress in British literature. In studying the movement of textual bodies produced through cultural exchange, Mangenelli navigates a space that in the nineteenth century imaginary and, until recently in literary studies, has been viewed as a barrier between American and British cultures. Opening up a traditionally neglected dialogue between these two figures, women historically confined to separate literary histories, the author examines how these literatures create and disseminate racial concepts across cultures. -
NYU PressIdle Threats : Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth Century America
Andrew Lyndon Knighton
The 19th century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and “gentlemen of refinement” capturing the imagination of a country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. Idle Threats documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. -
NYU PressUnbecoming Blackness : The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America
Antonio López
In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. -
NYU PressRacial Indigestion : Eating Bodies in the 19th Century
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which …
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Rutgers University PressTroublemakers : Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker
William Scott
William Scott's Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. With the rise of mechanization and assembly-line labor from the 1890s to the 1930s, these laborers found that they had been transformed into a class of "mass" workers who, since that time, have been seen alternately as powerless, degraded victims or heroic, empowered icons who could rise above their oppression only through the help of representative organizations located outside the workplace. -
Fordham University PressAmerican Metempsychosis : Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry
John Michael Corrigan
“The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human.” With these words, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates the formation of American individualism: To evolve and become fully human requires a heightened engagement with history. Americans, Emerson argues, must realize history’s chronology in themselves— because their own minds and bodies are its evolving record. Whereas scholarship has tended to minimize the mystical underpinnings of Emerson’s notion of the self, his depictions of “the metempsychosis of nature” reveal deep roots in mystical traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Platonism and Christian esotericism. In essay after essay, Emerson uses metempsychosis as an open-ended template for understanding human development. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman transforms Emerson’s conception of metempsychotic selfhood into an expressly poetic event. His vision of transmigration viscerally celebrates the poet’s ability to assume and live in other bodies; his American poet seeks to incorporate the entire nation into his own person so that he can speak for every man and woman. -
Fordham University PressGhost-Watching American Modernity : Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination
María del Pilar Blanco
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, María del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development.