Land Goddesses, Divine Pigs, and Royal Tricksters: Subversive Mythologies and Imperialist Land Ownership Dispossession in Twentieth-Century Irish and American Literature

Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/1999) SUELLEN STRINGER-HYE (Nashville) The Weed Exiles the Flower (Melville and Nabokov) Vladimir Nabokov adopted a new identity as well as a new country when he moved to America. In his mind, he soon ceased to be Sirin, the Russian poet and novelist, but was now an American writer, however unpronounceable his last name. Nabokov's vision of himself as American citizen and writer is chronicled in countless interviews and conespondence dating from 1962 until his death. "I think of myself as an American writer who has once been a Russian one."1 "I am as American as an April in Arizona."2 Commenting on the weight gained when he quit smoking, Nabokov said, "I am 1/3 American —good American flesh keeping me warm and safe."3 Never one to be taken at his word, Nabokov was, no doubt, talking about more than mid-life corpulence. Still, it has been difficult to place him in an American context. Although Leona Toker has argued Nabokov's connection to Nathaniel Hawthorne,4 many critics see him as much an abenation in the American tradition as he was in the Russian.5 Susan Elizabeth Sweeney discusses Nabokov's emotional attachment to the landscape and lepidoptera of America and, while finding temperamental affinities, does not associate him with a 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, New York: McGraw-Hill (1973), p. 63. 2. Ibid., p. 98. 3. Ibid., p. 26-27. See also p. 124, "I am an American, I feel American, and I like that feeling"; p. 131, "An American writer means..."; p. 192 "I see myself as an American writer...." 4. Leona Toker, "Nabokov and the Hawthorne Tradition," Studies in American Civilization XXXII (1987), 323-49. 5. Alexei Zverev, "Nabokov, Updike and American Literature," in Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Garland Pub. (1995), p. 538. Zverev states: "...for Updike, Nabokov is all the more attractive precisely because he has no analogue in either the American literary tradition or among his contemporaries. ...Is it really possible to speak of Nabokov as an American writer?" 118 Nabokov Studies particular American literary tradition.6 With most we can agree that Nabokov was a writer who does not fit neatly into traditional linguistic, cultural or generic categories, and perhaps we should not force him to do so.7 But neither should we discount Nabokov's professed love for his adopted homeland, a love that had been nurtured from youth, by reading such diverse specimens of American culture as Mayne Reid's Wild West novels and William James' psychological works.8 Literary culture was, for Nabokov, a living entity.9 When naming himself an American, he was implicitly positioning himself within the self-constructed framework of American cultural elements for which he had an appreciation. Nabokov was candid about the American writers in whom he had no interest; Faulkner especially, Hemingway and Henry James for the most part.10 He was equally vocal about his loves: in his youth, Poe, some of Emerson's poetry, the short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger. He liked John Updike.11 The highest praise, however, he reserved for Herman Melville. When Alfred Appel asked him in 1967 which American writers he admired, he responded "When I was young I liked Poe and I still love Melville."12 Nabokov's handwritten notes for a Book World interview record the response, "Dear Anton, Dear Leo", to a query about favorite Russian authors; "Melville" to the query about favorite Americans.13 The inclusion of 6. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, "As American as an April in Arizona," American Literary History, 6 (1994), 325-35 (p. 325). 7. See "Extraterritorial" in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel and Charles Newman, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1971), 119-27. 8. D. Barton Johnson, "Vladimir Nabokov and Captain Mayne Reid", Cycnos 10 (1993), 99-106, and D. Barton Johnson, "Tenor': Pre-Texts and Post-Texts" in A Small Alpine Form: Nabokov's Short Fiction, eds. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo, New York: Garland (1993), 39-64. Johnson also says "VN was friendly with James' son who lived in Cambridge, Mass...

Un/Natural Motherhood in Marina Carr’s The Mai, Portia Couglan, and By the Bog of Cats . . . Karin Maresh (bio) I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. . . . The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way. MARINA CARR As Karen Bamford and Sheila Rabillard note in their introduction to this collection of essays, the mother-daughter bond that was deemed “too difficult” to stage by women playwrights at the height of second-wave feminism in the 1980s has become more common in the plays of the past quarter century.1 This is especially true of Irish drama, most notably through the work of Marina Carr. The mothers in Carr’s plays remain as depressed and tormented as their predecessors; however, they suffer for different reasons. Whereas the mothers of early-twentieth-century Irish drama suffered the deaths of their children, often to the nationalist cause, the mothers in Carr’s plays suffer because they defy the core concepts of essential motherhood that have defined motherhood in Ireland for so long. They are selfish, rather than self-less; they are often ambivalent about rather than accepting of motherhood and marriage; they are openly sexual rather than chaste; they are damaged from maternal abuse or neglect; and they harbor violent tendencies that result in abuse, suicides, and filicide. [End Page 179] In short, the women of Carr’s The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), and By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) are “unnatural” mothers who suffer because they are women for whom the ability to mother does not come naturally, or because they mother their children in ways that contradict the patriarchal model of essential motherhood entrenched in Irish culture. Self-sacrificing mothers, whose needs and desires are always secondary to those of their children and any male characters, can be found in numerous Irish plays of the early twentieth century. Often these women are depicted as suffering martyrs, or “Moaning Mammies,” as defined by Áine McCarthy in her study of Irish mothers in twentieth-century Irish fiction (97).2 For example, J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) depicts a mother of the Aran Islands who loses all six of her sons to the treacherous sea. In the end, she is left, along with her two daughters, to keen for her sons: “They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me.”3 In Lady Augusta Gregory’s Gaol Gate (1906) a mother mourns the death of her son wrongly accused by the state, and, calling upon nationalistic stirrings, declares her son’s baby boy lucky in being able to boast of such an honorable father who remained loyal to his countrymen even in the face of death. The suffering, self-sacrificing mother is also represented in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) through the characters of Juno and Mrs. Tancred. Both women lose their sons to the Irish Civil War, and the saintly Juno endures the antics of her drunkard husband and the unplanned pregnancy of her unwed daughter. The mothers in these plays are devoted to their children—especially their sons—and do not question their essential categorization as woman/mother. They are mothers first and individuals second. In fact, mothers present in much of twentieth-century Irish drama, with only a few exceptions, are, as Diane Stubbings argues, “merely apparent” and contained within the male character(s)’ story.4 This reflection of the social positioning for women in Irish society—women who are “rendered invisible, or when visible . . . [are] seen one-dimensionally,”5 as Patricia Kennedy notes in Maternity in Ireland—continues in Irish drama through most of the century. They are characters who are the result of the idealization of motherhood by the Catholic Church in Ireland, especially during the mid-twentieth century when, according to Clare O’Hagan, the Church urged women to act “as patriarchal gatekeepers, promoting motherhood and family...

382 CLA JOURNAL Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 184 pp. ISBN: 9780813935737. Paperback: $24.50. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature explains the rationale for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1827 statement that “[n]ational literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature [Weltliteratur] is at hand” (1). In the introduction, Jason Frydman uses Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic periodization” to offer an alternative narrative of world literary history that promotes “a diasporic idea of Africa before European hegemony, extending to our own contemporary moment through the works of Du Bois, Hurston, Carpentier, Walcott, Condé, and Morrison” (7-8). Frydman’s subsequent examination of the interplay among European, African American, and Caribbean authors who historically have been analyzed within different global, national, and regional frameworks is as important for the study of world literature as it is for the study of African diaspora literature, because it decenters Europe’s role in world literature, destabilizes temporal narratives of literary progress, and deconstructs reemerging binary oppositions in contemporary literary criticism. In Sounding the Break, Frydman reconsiders African American and Caribbean authors’ diverse twentieth-century literature in a world literary context. While examining early to mid-twentieth-century literature in chapters one through three, Frydman demonstrates Du Bois’s appreciation of the classics, deconstructs oral/textual binaries in Hurston’s writing, and examines Carpentier’s attempts to “break [the] Latin American dependency on European literary trends” (66). In chapters four through six on mid-to-late twentieth-century literature, Frydman emphasizes Walcott’s movement across theoretical binaries like “‘African/ European’”and“‘colonial/anticolonial’”(Dash qtd. in Frydman 92), maps Condé’s “material involvement with world narrative systems” (102), and reconsiders Morrison’s “African American vernacular culture as one node rhizomatically linked to a sprawling global array” (131). At times, Sounding the Break’s loosely chronological structure and reiteration of historical narratives and oppositional binaries that have been used to privilege Europe over Africa seem to go against the grain of Frydman’s broader theoretical aims to more fully recognize the “African diasporic textuality” of “world literature’s longue dureé” (142); however, Frydman’s nuanced comparative analyses expose significant transatlantic connections among European, African American, and Caribbean authors and genres, such as Du Bois’s modernist aesthetics, Carpentier’s baroque techniques, and Condé’s “gothic elements” (113). More specifically, the examination of Goethe’s and Du Bois’s mutual appreciation of the classics emphasizes world literature’s earlier African origins and diasporicroutes. InTheNegro(1915),DuBoisrepresentsAfricaasthe“foundation” of the classics (25), and his integration of “classical culture” (36), such as in The Book Reviews CLA JOURNAL 383 Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), unravels perceived differences between “AngloAmerican ” and “Afro-American” modernisms (39). After demonstrating world literature’s“longue durée,”such as Africa’s earlier and more foundational roles, and the modernist overlap among twentieth-century European and American authors, Frydman reconsiders oppositional binaries that reappear in literary criticism of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature (12). The comparative analyses of diverse twentieth-century texts that traditionally havebeenexaminedwithinAfricanAmericanandCaribbeanliterarycontextsrather than world literary contexts meaningfully deconstruct unevenly valued binaries that have been associated with Africa and Europe, such as orality and textuality. Relevant examples of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature’s diasporic routes and hybrid networks include the simultaneous orality and textuality of the Pentateuch in Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and the focus on “Afro-Caribbean culture”as a means to“displace Europe as the privileged center of perceptual and artistic authority” in Carpentier’s Bildungsroman, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933) (65). The fusion of folk and elite discourses in Walcott’s play, The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and the destabilization of mythical and historical binaries vis-àvis criticism of the griot in Condé’s Ségou (1984-85) also are notable examples. SoundingtheBreakinsightfullytracesworldliterature’sevolvinghistoriography and African American and Caribbean literature’s global origins, intertexts, and networks. In the conclusion, Frydman explains the importance of recognizing the global intertextuality of African American and Caribbean literature, even if texts resist a global context, such as in Morrison’s novels. By reconsidering...

It is hard to overstate the impact Susan Shillinglaw has had on Steinbeck studies. For her long-term tenure as the director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University, her subsequent role as the director of the National Steinbeck Center, and her numerous books and articles on a wide variety of Steinbeckian topics, the Monterey Herald dubbed her “the queen of Steinbeck studies” (Marcos Cabrera, “With Susan Shillinglaw, Steinbeck Center Starts New Chapter,” 17 June 2015).Two of the most important themes in Shillinglaw's Steinbeck scholarship have been environmental issues and fleshing out aspects of the author's biography, particularly as it was affected by significant women—especially Carol Brown Steinbeck and Elaine Scott Steinbeck. These themes are present throughout her work, and are particularly evident in the groundbreaking 1997 tome Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches—coedited with Susan F. Beegal and Wesley N. Tiffney Jr.—and her numerous biographical/critical publications on aspects of his life, particularly his relationship with Carol, Steinbeck's first wife. Taken as a whole, Shillinglaw's career amounts to a continuous challenge to reread and reexamine Steinbeck's life and work within the context of his complex relationships with his native land, California's Salinas Valley, and surrounding environs.Viewed from this perspective, A Journey Into Steinbeck's California (now in its third edition) explores Steinbeck's “holistic sense of place,” a multilayered vision which encompasses a place's current appearance (the surface), its people (human interactions), its history, and the interconnectedness of all living things. For the purposes of clarity, I will deal with each edition in chronological order of publication, starting with the first.Chapter 1, “Steinbeck's California: The Valley of the World,” outlines the sense of place and concludes, “With Steinbeck, we can pay attention to the slant of afternoon light, catch some of the region's layered past, and get a glimpse of small human stories tucked into inland valleys. These elements are essential to Steinbeck's sense of place, a panorama of human histories played out on California's inland mountains and Pacific coast” (11). Each chapter is interspersed with photos and images illustrating the location under focus. Photographed by Nancy Burnett, the majority of these photos are landscapes, panoramic full-color shots which resemble landscape descriptions in Steinbeck's own work. Some have simple captions identifying locations, but many others are captioned with excerpts from Steinbeck's work or, in some cases, with historical explanations (such as the discussion of the impact that the opening of Highway 1 had on both Steinbeck and on California in general). Other, smaller black-and-white photos are historical pictures showing Steinbeck himself at various ages of his life, or members of his family, or specific locations as they looked back in Steinbeck's day.Shillinglaw's skillful combination of environmental analysis and biography work with Burnett's photographs to create an immersive experience for the reader who would understand John Steinbeck's world. Shillinglaw's comments examine the implications of Steinbeck's sense of place; Burnett's photos illustrate that sense of place. The result is a whole greater than the sum of its parts; taken separately, it's a thoughtful analysis and some nice pictures; taken together, text and photos offer unique insights that would not be possible without the presence of both.The rest of the book is divided into specific California locations connected to Steinbeck—places where he lived and places depicted in his fiction. The chapters are arranged in the order in which Steinbeck lived in that place, and the chapters form a rough biography (that is far more than biography) of his California years, although Shillinglaw does not confine herself to strict chronology when it does not suit her purposes. Chapter 2, “Salinas: A Remembered Symphony,” details Steinbeck's Salinas, exploring locations important to the author's childhood and youth, the neighborhood where he grew up, and his gravesite. Events of cultural and historical significance are highlighted, including events as diverse as the Salinas rodeo and the Japanese internment during World War II. Included are excerpts from and brief discussions of a number of works, particularly East of Eden, historical pictures, together with Burnett's landscape photos. The chapter also includes a discussion of Steinbeck's uneasy relationship with his hometown; although he is, by far, Salinas's most famous native son, his sometimes less than flattering portrayal of his hometown and his social activism made many residents in this conservative area uncomfortable. Chapter 3, “Beyond Salinas: The Salad Bowl of the World,” explores the rest of the Salinas Valley, including the Red Pony Ranch, agriculture and migrant labor, the sugar industry, and the ranch owned by the Hamiltons, Steinbeck's maternal grandparents. The origins of stories in The Pastures of Heaven¸ Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden are explored.“Moving Around: A Restless Decade” is the topic of Chapter 4, which details Steinbeck's seminomadic post–high school career. This period included Steinbeck's erratic six years at Stanford between 1919 and 1925; his friendships made in college, including Toby Street and Carlton “Dook” Sheffield, both of whom became lifelong friends; and his literary apprenticeship under writing professor Edith Mirrielees, who would continue to read and comment on his work long after he left the university. The chapter chronicles Steinbeck's important sojourn in New York City in 1925–26, where he traveled via boat through the Panama Canal, an episode which gave him much material for Cup of Gold, his first novel, and which exposed him to the grinding poverty that can shape peoples' destinies. Shillinglaw draws useful comparisons between Steinbeck's time in New York and the formative years of both Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. This chapter also chronicles Steinbeck's two winters in primitive conditions on Lake Tahoe, where he explored nature, focused on his writing, and developed the work habits that would serve him well in later years, particularly during the composition of The Grapes of Wrath.Chapters 5–8 examine Steinbeck's time on the Monterey Peninsula and his relationship with this place where he wrote the works that became his first popular successes. Tortilla Flat was set there, and Steinbeck's fiction would continually return to the peninsula long after he left California. Chapter 5, titled “Monterey Peninsula: Circle of Enchantment,” offers an analysis of Steinbeck's development, noting that the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Peninsula were the “two ecosystems he knew best growing up” (66). The descriptions contrast the “Anglo-Saxon, westering pioneers who are the major players” in the author's “valley fiction”—To a God Unknown, The Red Pony, and parts of East of Eden—with the “multidirectional and multiethnic” Monterey, the source for works such as Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and other parts of East of Eden (68). This chapter and the following three are particularly useful for students, scholars, and readers of Steinbeck. For, virtually uniquely among white male canonical American authors of his generation, one of Steinbeck's strengths as an author is that he sees that the land has always been occupied, that others came before we did, that a place may have many histories, and that, in the future, others will likely occupy the land (possibly by replacing its current occupants). As one trained in marine biology and in ecosystems, he not only acknowledges the possibility of change, but he also celebrates these continuous changes as part of the never-ending motion that characterizes every living system.Chapter 5 discusses the many peoples who have inhabited the Monterey Peninsula, examining the relationship between the “Native Californians of Monterey,” or paisanos, and other residents, concluding with a discussion of Tortilla Flat and the events that Steinbeck used imaginatively in that novel. “Pacific Grove: A Writer's Retreat,” Chapter 6, explores Steinbeck's time in that city, his growing awareness of marine biology, his long-term relationship with the Hopkins Marine Station, his growing friendship with Ed Ricketts, and how these elements shaped his growing understanding of the world, of the natural environment, and of how to depict these things in narrative art. Chapter 7, titled “New Monterey: Water Gazers,” describes the city as “liminal space on the peninsula” (107), a place where “fishermen and immigrants” were able to take hold. Ed Ricketts's life and scientific views are explored, along with the friendship among Steinbeck, Ricketts, and scholar of myth Joseph Campbell. Possible real-life models for characters in Cannery Row are discussed, including Ricketts as a stand-in for Doc and Flora Woods, the model for Dora Flood in Cannery Row and Fauna in Sweet Thursday. Throughout the book, Shillinglaw and Burnett provide maps describing the location the chapter depicts. All of these maps are useful, and the map of Monterey, with its correlations among various settings in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, provides a richer understanding of both books.The final chapter on the Monterey Peninsula, “Bohemian Carmel: Modernism in the West,” explores the artists' enclave in that city and the influence that four of its residents—Beth Ingels, Lincoln Steffens, Edward Weston, and Robinson Jeffers—had on Steinbeck's artistic development. This chapter illustrates another strength of this book: through photos, commentary, and excerpts, Shillinglaw contextualizes Steinbeck in context with other authors, most of whose work is infused with a strong sense of social justice.Following after the Monterey Peninsula, Chapter 9 moves to the subject of “Los Gatos: A Place to Write.” As she does in other sections, Shillinglaw explores the places where Steinbeck lived, the friendships he made, and the events that influenced his writing. Appropriately, this section is the longest because Los Gatos is where Steinbeck wrote what are arguably his most important works, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.Shillinglaw chronicles Steinbeck's trips throughout the labor-strife-torn rural areas as well as the nonfiction he wrote as he began to chronicle the plight of migrant workers, which resulted in Their Blood Is Strong and The Harvest Gypsies, and which provided grist for The Grapes of Wrath. The photographic curation is masterful in this chapter; Shillinglaw and Burnett provide contemporary photos, graphics, and print images from the 1930s, and historical photos to illustrate the cultural context that gave birth to Grapes as well as the ongoing relevance of Steinbeck's fiction. A photo of migrant workers being teargassed in 1936 seems remarkably prescient today.The final chapter is “Beyond California: The Lure of Mexico,” which explores Steinbeck's ongoing fascination with that country, the trip he and Ricketts took on the Western Flyer, and the collecting voyage that resulted in Sea of Cortez. The book concludes with a “Coda” discussing Steinbeck's move to New York in 1942, where he lived most of the rest of his life.The second edition of A Journey into Steinbeck's California, published in 2011, begins with an added preface that explores a paradoxical nature of Steinbeck's character: he was both a “homebody” and a wanderer. Steinbeck's “creative yearnings” and “wanderlust” are, Shillinglaw maintains, expressed in Pigasus, Steinbeck's personal stamp, which is an image of a flying pig. The preface concludes with a quotation from Sea of Cortez introducing Steinbeck's “tide pool” theory: that if one stretches beyond one's “own limitations,” one can look into a tide pool, see its connections with all things, then “leap out into the universe and … out of the moment into non-conceptual time.” When one can do that, “ecology has a synonym, which is all” (x). Steinbeck argues that California was Steinbeck's “tide pool.” This new introduction explicitly frames the book in terms of environmental and ecological terms, providing a nice setup for the work that will follow. The text has some minor revisions from the first edition but is largely unchanged; a few new photos are added. All told, the new preface and the added photographs fine-tune an already well-done work.The third edition has a different cover from the first two. It also revises the preface from the second edition and concludes with a paragraph worth quoting in its entirety: For “tide pool,” read any place one examines with full participation. In this book, that place is largely focused on Steinbeck's California, rich with associations that are multilayered: personal, historical, economical, cultural, and spiritual. This book captures Steinbeck's holistic vision of the place that was always the place of his heart, Central California, his home—all of it. (x) A mandala by Ray Troll, with “From the tide pool to the stars” at the top and “All things are one thing, one thing is all things” at the bottom, quotes from Sea of Cortez. Like the changes from the first edition to the second, the changes from the second edition to the third constitute a fine-tuning. This preface to the third edition constitutes Shillinglaw's clearest articulation to date of the relationship among Steinbeck's ecological views, the physical spaces in which he lived, and his fiction. This edition also breaks out the “Coda” from Chapter 10, chronicling Steinbeck's time in New York, to a separate chapter.In each of the three editions of A Journey into Steinbeck's California, Shillinglaw's thoughtful writing, Burnett's visually stunning landscape photos, and the curation of pictures and other images provide deep insight into Steinbeck's life and works. Each edition is a slight refinement of the previous one. The third edition represents a kind of culmination of Shillinglaw's thinking, a coming together of the various strands from Steinbeck scholars and work on other figures in American literature. A Journey into Steinbeck's California is a journey well worth taking.

Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies. Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn’s studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America’s first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism. To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn’s own work in American drama—Poe’s parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold. Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor’s practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn’s student. Those who know Quinn primarily for

Preface Katsunori Yamazato (bio) Voices from Okinawa offers writings by Okinawan Americans who were born either in the United States, such as Jon Shirota, June Hiroko Arakawa, and Philip K. Ige, or in Okinawa, such as Seiyei Wakukawa and Mitsugu Sakihara. It has been a dream of the editors to compile such an anthology. Voices is the first publication of its kind, presenting authors from a region of the world that has yet to be fully acknowledged in American and international literature. Some scholars and readers-but too few-have long been aware of the social and cultural atmosphere that is unique to literary works by Okinawan American writers. The best known of this literature is Jon Shirota's novel Lucky Come Hawaii. Widely read when first published by Bantam in 1965, the story was later adapted by Shirota as a play. It was produced in New York in 1990 by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, with a grant from the John F. Kennedy Center Foundation. The play was praised in the New York Times and continues to be produced in the U.S., along with Shirota's other plays about Okinawan immigrants and their descendants. Lucky Come Hawaii is set on Maui and begins immediately before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Some of the male Okinawan characters express strong pro-Japanese nationalism as soon as they hear about the attack. They begin to think that Japan will take over all of Hawai'i and even hope that this will happen soon so that they-not well-placed haoles (Caucasians)-will be able to control Maui. They imagine that victorious Japanese soldiers will come to Maui, so that even Okinawans-marginalized and discriminated against by the Naichi (Japanese immigrants from Japan's main islands)-will be big shots. So thinks Kama Gusuda, an Issei (first-generation immigrant) from a small, impoverished village in the northern part of Okinawa. The reactions of the various characters to the war reveal where they came from and how they have been affected by immigrating to Hawai'i. Shirota gives his Okinawan characters cultural and ethnic traits that distinguish them from other Japanese. The troubled relations between Okinawa and the rest of Japan have continued since 1879, when the Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed by the rising East Asian empire of the northern [End Page vii] islands. Even after Okinawans settle in Hawai'i and the United States, they must struggle for an identity of their own, Japanese and yet undeniably Okinawan. Despite the many cultural and linguistic distinctions, Okinawan writers have been seen as a small group within the larger category of Japanese American literature. Regarded as peripheral, these writers have generally been overlooked by scholars and editors. Why were Okinawan American writers not included in anthologies of Japanese American or Asian American writers? In Voices from Okinawa, readers will discover the exuberance and excellence of Okinawan American literature, as well as its importance to world literature. Showcasing these works is a way of questioning the established "canon" of Asian American and Japanese American literature. We believe that as more Okinawan Americans are published, these literary categories will be seen from a new perspective: more inclusive, complex, and multilayered. Okinawan American writing at present may be hidden deep in special collections and in public or private libraries. We look forward to presenting works by more Okinawan authors-both young and old-in the coming years. The publication of Voices from Okinawa is made possible by a grant from the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sciences of Japan. The University of the Ryukyus received a 2008 grant to do research on human migration, and we are grateful that the Pacific and North American Research Project generously provided the funds necessary for publishing this book. [End Page viii] Katsunori Yamazato Katsunori Yamazato received his doctorate from the University of California at Davis and is professor of American literature and culture at the University of the Ryukyus. His books include Great Earth Sangha: Dialogues between Gary Snyder and Sansei Yamao; Japanese translations of Snyder's A Place in Space and Mountains and Rivers without End; and Post-War Okinawa and America: Fifty Years of Cross-Cultural Contact...

Law and American literature is a subfield of the wider interdisciplinary field of law and literature. Law and literature are socially embedded discourses that rely on narrative and figures of speech to describe events, render them meaningful, and persuade audiences. Even as law and literature each has its own unique rhetorical forms (e.g., the statute, the legal opinion, the novel, the poem), as well as specific techniques and protocols for creating, organizing, and disseminating their narrative products, they share a fundamental commitment to ordering and interpreting our understanding of the world around us. Although the law itself is often thought of as an objective arena to which disputes are brought for adjudication and resolution, law does much more than simply arbitrate preexisting disputes. It is inherently a political and rhetorical practice that has coercive power to shape in myriad ways the most significant and intimate aspects of our lives. Law confers and delimits rights and opportunities, privileges some identities and disadvantages others, and defines acceptable and proscribed behaviors. Unsurprisingly, then, the law and important legal issues have been a constant source of interest and inspiration for American literary authors. Although obviously lacking law’s coercive or normative power, literature alternatively provides ways of thinking and imagines modes of being that help to form readers’ understandings of the world and their places in it. Over the 21st century, American writers’ longstanding interest in the law has been particularly resonant for Americanist literary critics, who often combine a theoretically informed historicist interpretive methodology with an interest in social justice. Scholars of “law and American literature” have provided sophisticated analyses of literature and law’s intersection on a litany of subjects. Prominent among these topics has been scholars’ examination of the many ways that legal and literary works have parsed the racial dynamics of the United States, a nation that has repeatedly used the law to construct and organize racial difference. Significant areas of imbrication between law and American literature over the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries include slavery, citizenship, property, and incarceration.

During her 1923 trip to Europe, Anzia Yezierska made the appointed rounds of any serious American author of the early 1920s. According to her daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen, Yezierska sought out George Bernard Shaw, Israel Zangwill, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Joseph Conrad to discover the secrets of their writing. The most interesting visit was with Gertrude Stein in Paris, where Stein gave her some typically Steinian advice: Why worry? Nobody knows how writing is written, the writers least of all! (Henriksen 195). The encounter between Yezierska and Stein has essentially gone unexamined in scholarship on these two writers, in part because they inhabit profoundly different spheres of the American literary canon. Despite the fact that they are both Jewish American women of roughly the same generation (Stein was born in 1874, Yezierska around 1880), they have come to represent very different things to scholars of American literature. Stein, firmly embedded in the modernist canon, has only recently been examined under the rubric of ethnic writing by critics such as Maria Damon, Barbara Will, and Priscilla Wald, while Yezierska's rise in American literary studies has been fueled by the interest in the subcanon of ethnic women's writing. (1) Yezierska's 1923 meeting with Stein certainly does not figure as the same kind of watershed moment in American modernism as Ernest Hemingway's arrival at 27 me de Fleums in the previous year. After all, Hemingway approached Stein as an apprentice and Yezierska's meeting occurred after she had already become a successful writer. However, the insistence that Stein remain an unqualified modernist writer, and that Yezierska, at best, be labeled an ethnic modernist suggests an inability of existing literary subcanons to adequately deal with the variety of modernist writing produced in this era. Yezierska was all but invisible to scholars of American literature until the 1970s. Outside a brief mention in Allen Guttmann's 1971 study The Jewish Writer in America, Yezierska was even largely absent from the Jewish American literary canon, which was more kind to conventional realist and modernist figures such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Henry Roth. (2) Yezierska's rediscovery by literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s (with the republication of Bread Givers [1925] in 1975, and the publication of the Yezierska collection The Open Cage [1979] and the 1985 edition of Hungry Hearts [1920]) came on the heels of an increasing interest in narratives of working women by feminist scholars. (3) As Mary V. Dearborn notes, Yezierska's fiction is welcomed, in short, because it provides valuable documentary evidence that ethnic women existed (Anzia 108). To both feminist and labor historians, such documentation was crucial to the expansion of labor histories to include more diverse voices in the understanding of twentieth-century labor. Since Yezierska's rediscovery, the scholarship on her work has consistently emphasized ethnicity, gender, and class, placing her in subcanons that write out meetings like the one between Stein and Yezierska. Critics have recently gone so far as to include her in studies of Yiddish literature, even though she never published in Yiddish. (4) Ethnic American writers such as Yezierska have been both blessed and cursed by the last thirty years of American literary scholarship. With the emergence of ethnic studies, many American writers long forgotten by literary historians have reemerged in new editions and made their way into classrooms and scholarly journals. This new attention has certainly been a boon for Zora Neale Hurston, whose work has become an indisputable part of the American and African American literary canons. While less canonical ethnic writers continue to inspire a significant amount of scholarship, the relationship of these writers to the rest of American literary history remains murky. In certain cases, such as Michael North's The Dialect of Modernism (1994), writers such as Hurston and Claude McKay form a background for understanding the racial and linguistic appropriations of already canonized high modernists such as Stein, T. …

The entire study has been engaged itself to make a comparison in between British Literature and American Literature. Both American and English literature has been divided with various periods which have been significantly discussed while analyzing the eminent works and features of each era. The history of English language, British Literature, American literature has been showcased within the entire study. American and British literature both has their own significance in their own sphere of influence. Comparison between both of this literature will be a total disaster but there are still some of the differences. American literature is motivated with ideologies like political infirmity, religions and social conditions. Whereas British literature is full of romantic tales and literature is more motivated to the human as well as moral values. All of the above have been resulted due to the ideologies of both the countries' writers. The British writers are however considered as the classical writers while American writers are the modern writers. The conclusion has given a brief account of this while discussion Keyword : American Literature, English literature, periods, writers

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Writers of color in the U.S. have been producing novels, poetry, and essays in American letters since the eighteenth century, particularly African American writers.1 But before the social, cultural, and political movements and forces of the 1960s, very little literature by writers of color was institutionalized and/or in print. For example, before the 1970s, Three Negro Classics, comprising of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, was the most visible text by African Americans readily available. Although Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) remained in print, the bulk of African American literature was out of print until the 1970s. Although American Indians had been writing fiction, which was also consistently out of print, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was the publication of N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn in 1968, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, and Dee Brown's best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) that initiated a renaissance in Native American history and literature in the 1970s. And although there were scattered out-of-print literary and autobiographical texts by Asian American writers from the early and middle parts of the twentieth century such as Korean-American Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West (1937), Japanese-American John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Chinese-American Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), and some autobiographies (Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1945, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter, 1953), Asian American literature becomes visible and begins to emerge as a legitimate field of inquiry with the publication of some ground-breaking anthologies and of Maxine Hong [End Page 173] Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). The situation with Latino/a literature in print was equally as dismal. As the Hispanic Recovery Project informs us, there were unpublished and/or out-of-print Mexican/Mexican American testimonials at the turn of the twentieth century. But before the 1960s there were only a scattering of Latino/a texts in print such as Pocho (1959) by the Mexican American writer Jose Antonio Villareal. But with the transformative Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—including the Chicano movement and the groundbreaking work of the Chicano/a Arts movement, the Puerto Rican labor activist movement and the Nuyorican Arts movement, American Indian Movement (AIM) and the American Indian literary renaissance, the nationalist/Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Asian American movement, and the Women's movement, the 1970s and 1980s were renaissance periods for the literatures of American Indians, Latinos/as, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Thus, by the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s the literature of writers of color in the U.S. had grown and matured, successfully challenging and transforming American literature, which continues until today. The literatures that emerged from this period were further developed and institutionalized with the re-printing of pre-1960s literary texts, the establishment of ethnic studies programs and departments on the campuses of American colleges and universities, and the inclusion of ethnic literature in mainstream American literature courses, allowing the literatures to be taught, studied, assessed, written about, and therefore to remain in print. Although some of the literatures written by people of color in the 1960s and 1970s overtly protested institutional, legal, and de facto racism, and captured the experiences of oppression/victimization, of colonization, and of the pain and confusion of being caught between two cultures, by the 1980s and 1990s many writers of color had come to assume the centrality of their race or ethnicity in their literature. This shift allowed them to move beyond protest, the white gaze, and the various binaries that positioned them as lower halves of binary oppositions, to take on the literary styles and issues of modernity/post-modernity, to...

Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, an American writer of Indian, or more precisely, Bengali descent, was released in 2008 and immediately became a number one New York Times bestseller. Interpreter of Maladies, her debut collection of short stories published ten years earlier, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. Her novel The Namesake, published in 2003, increased her popularity; this was facilitated by the 2006 film based on the novel. Jhumpa Lahiri currently lives in Italy. The American authors’ yearning for Italy is by no means unusual and Jhumpa Lahiri, like the characters of Henry James novels, plunged headlong into the European environment and a new life. In 2018, the writer published a book entitled Dove Mi Trovo; it is written in Italian and is entitled Whereabouts in the author’s own English translation. Later, she wrote a collection of essays, Translating Myself and Others (2022), based on her experience translating Italian authors into English. The setting of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories and novels (America, India, Italy, Thailand) is as diverse as the topics she deals with – arranged marriages and family problems, alienation, loss and the search for cultural roots, difficulties emerging between generations of immigrants and the peculiarities of assimilation. All these problems are not alien to her personally, as a second-generation immigrant, and thus their artistic portrayal becomes even more convincing, and valuable. Jhumpa Lahiri’s trilogy Hema and Kaushik stands out from the other stories in the collection of Unaccustomed Earth. This is also demonstrated by the author dividing the stories into a separate, second part. An observant reader will notice that all three have common characters – Hema and Kaushik. The main reason for considering the short stories as a trilogy lies in the fact that it is only possible to perceive their narrative and artistic depths when they are taken together. Although these stories by Jhumpa Lahiri also deal with the traditional theme of emigration and the difficulties and traumas associated with it, the main focus of the Hema and Kaushik trilogy is the heterogeneity and hybridity of the immigrant identity, alienation, and finding one’s place in this world in general, and not just in a new environment. The reader follows the life of a boy and a girl who meet by chance in Massachusetts one winter. Their paths are full of pain, love, anticipation and fear of death. This series is far from purely immigrant literature. It touches upon universal concepts. Although academic sources and popular periodicals refer to Jhumpa Lahiri as an Indian American or South Asian writer, she does not consider herself an Indian writer and the epigraph chosen for Unaccustomed Earth emphasizes her close ties to American literary traditions. With the quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom House, on the one hand she emphasizes her commitment to the American literary tradition and on the other, with the spirit of this collection and with her personal experience, she enters into a polemic with the opinion expressed in the epigraph.

Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is a multidisciplinary exploration of the ways that African American ohoto musicuminstrelsy, ragtime, jazz, and especially bluesuemerged into the American cultural mainstream in the nineteenth century and ultii??mately dominated American music and literature from 1920 to 1929. Exploring the deep and enduring relationship between music and literature, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature examines the diverse ways in which African American ohoto music ini??fluenced American cultureuparticularly literatureuin early twentieth century America. Steven C. Tracy provides a history of the fusion of Afrii??can and European elements that formed African American ohoto music, and considers how terms like ragtime, jazz, and blues developed their own particular meanings for American music and society. He draws from the fields of literature, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, American studies, and folklore to demonstrate how blues as a musical and poetic form has been a critical influence on American literature. Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature begins by highlighting instances in which American writers, including Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Gertrude Stein, use African American culi??ture and music in their work, and then characterizes the social context of the Jazz Age, discussing how African American music reflected the wild abandon of the time. Tracy focuses on how a variety of schools of early twentieth century writers, from modernists to members of the Harlem Renaissance to dramatists and more, used their connections with ohoto music to give their own work meaning. TracyAEs extensive and detailed understanding of how African American ohoto music operates has produced a fresh and original perspective on its influence on mainstream American literature and culture. An experienced blues musician himself, Tracy draws on his performance background to offer an added dimension to his analysis. Where ani??other blues scholar might only analyse blues language, Tracy shows how the language is actually performed. Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is the first book to offer such a refreshingly broad interdisciplinary vision of the influence of African American ohoto music on American literature. It is an essential addition to the library of serious scholars of American and African American literature and culture and blues aficionados alike.

Gothic Domesticity in Eugene O'Neill's <i>Desire Under the Elms</i>

Foreign Bodies:

THE FEMALE INITIATION THEME IN AMERICAN FICTION Elaine Ginsberg* One of the classic motifs in all literatures is that of initiation. The archetypal pattern of the initiation story, in the broadest sense, presents an innocent young person, inexperienced in the ways of the world and uncertain of his own role in that world, who, through some experience or series of experiences, awakens from his innocence and approaches or perhaps even crosses the threshold of adulthood, maturity, and selfawareness .1 Although the initiation motif appears in all genres and in the literature of all cultures, it seems to have found its fullest expression in American fiction. Indeed, William Coyle, editor of The Young Man in American Literature: The Initiation Theme, notes that "the initiation theme is so pervasive in American literature that a full bibliography is impossible."2 It is interesting, however, that, as pervasive as the initiation theme is, the great majority of initiation stories in American literature are about young men. As Coyle observes, "American writers have seldom developed this theme in fiction about young women." He suggests as a possible explanation that "perhaps the American girl is assumed to be born with knowledge that the young man must acquire through experience."3 A study of the images of women in American literature would seem to suggest that Coyle is wrong. It seems more likely that the theme of female initiation is rare in American literature because women, as they have been traditionally depicted in American literature, are presumed to need no knowledge of the world. And, indeed, when they have attained such and become self-sufficient "adult" individuals, they have generally been portrayed as outcasts. For example, Herbert R¿ Brown, in his study The Sentimental Novel in America: 1789-1860, summarizes the portrait of the nineteenthcentury sentimental heroine: her role was "to refine and spiritualize man" and to "ennoble civilization" through her purity and innocence.4 Her sphere of action was, of course, extremely limited, confined by the "Professor Ginsberg teaches in the Department of English at West Virginia University. This paperwas presented before a meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association in Boston in April, 1973. 28Efoine Ginsberg institution of marriage. "The 'new woman' who entertained ambitions outside the family circle was regarded as 'the moral horror of the time.' "5 James Fenimore Cooper's attitude seems typical of the nineteenth century. In The Ways of the Hour (1850), he warned his female readers that a woman's activity outside the family circle invariably led to "a sacrifice of womanly character and womanly grace. . . . The person who would draw the sex from the quiet scenes that they so much embellish, to mingle in the strifes of the world; who would place them in stations that nature has obviously intended men should occupy, is not their real friend."6 Even the domestic novel of the nineteenth century, the aim of which most often seemed to be to demonstrate the moral superiority of women, demonstrated that superiority in terms of innocence, purity, and piety, and within the institution of marriage.7 The "classic" American writers also portrayed an extremely circumscribed role for women. Hawthorne's Hollingsworth thus defined woman's role: She is the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character. Her place is at man's side. Her office, that of sympathizer, the unreserved, unquestioning believer. ... All the separate action of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster—thank heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster—without a man as her acknowledged principal! . . . The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it.8 Women who stepped beyond their proper sphere, who violated the accepted code of behavior, were portrayed as fallen women, to be shunned by men and other women alike. Recently, both Wendy Martin and Carolyn Heilbrun have attributed the creation of this myth of woman's role to the industrialization of society in the eighteenth and nineteenth...