The View from Above in American Literature: Aerial Description, the Imaginary, and the Form of Environment

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

170 Western American Literature Jonathan Edwards. Simonson professes himself, in quaint fundamentalistic formulae, to be a born-again believer in this tradition, and practices the study of literature according to its canons. The result is nothing less than a constant polemic against a literary tradition which is uncongenial to his beliefs. Such a result is impressive — nothing less than a thorough jettisoning of the liber­ ating ideas of the last two hundred years. WILLIAM H. SHURR The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Studies in American Indian Literature. Edited by Paula Gunn Allen. (New York: Modem Language Association, 1983. 384 pages, $13.50.) Three American Literatures. Edited by Houston R. Baker, Jr. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982. 265 pages, $9.50.) Paula Gunn Allen’s Studies in American Indian Literature and Houston A. Baker’s Three American Literatures are both results of the Modern Language Association’s interest in minority/ethnic literature and language. Studies in American Indian Literature deals exclusively with Indian litera­ ture, while Three American Literatures discusses Mexican-American, Native American, and Asian-American literatures. Studies in American Indian Literature is a collection of essays on Indian oral literature, autobiography, and Indian women’s literature. There is a section on modern and contemporary Indian literature, a section on the Indian in American literature, and a section on available resources in the field such as anthologies, texts, and scholarly articles. Each of the major sections in the book is followed by suggested course outlines and suggested reading lists. It is a text that is designed for the teacher who wishes to teach a course in this area rather than for the student. As a secondary source book, Studies in American Indian Literature has much to recommend it. Many of the articles such as Patricia Clark Smith’s “Coyote Ortiz,” LaVonne Ruoff’s “American Indian Literatures,” and James Ruppert’s “Discovering America” are first rate. While the level of the other articles tends to vary, the majority are competent. The most obvious problem is that several of the articles are out of date and should have been revised prior to publication. Paula Gunn Allen’s “The Sacred Hoop,” which discusses oral literature, is one such example. Originally written in 1975, the article has received no additional attention even though the discussion of Indian oral literature has produced new ideas and directions. A second problem lies in the suggested reading lists. For whatever reason, the lists are highly selective. Normally this would not be a particular concern, but the additions and the omissions tend to suggest that the lists were devel­ oped along the lines of personal taste rather than as a result of a scholarly stance. Reviews 171 Nonetheless, Studies in American Indian Literature is a book that should be recommended and read. At the same time, the Modern Language Associa­ tion should seriously consider publishing a second edition, updating several of the articles that need revision, adding a number of newer articles, and correct­ ing the deficiencies in the reading lists. Three American Literatures is not as ambitious an undertaking. Where Allen’s book would probably function best as a teacher’s text, Baker’s is designed more for students. Three American Literatures is a superficial intro­ duction to the literature produced by Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans. While Raymond A. Paredes’ “The Evolution of Chicano Literature” is competent, the rest of the articles tend to be very uneven. Kenneth Lincoln’s “Native American Literatures,” while it contains some interesting ideas and surveys a broad range of literature, is a victim of the author’s romantic notions about Indians and Indian literature. The essay also tends to wander, much like a child out gathering flowers with little regard for direction or pace. “An Introduction to Chinese-American and JapaneseAmerican Literatures,” the lead article in the section on Asian-American literature, is not so much an examination of the literature as it is an ad hominem attack on certain writers such as Virginia Lee, Parde Lowe, Jade Snow Wong, and Betty Lee Sung. The authors of the article, themselves writers, spend a good part of the essay discussing their own work and patting themselves on the back for...

Poe-Related PhD Dissertations (2017–2021)

Beginning in the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of American Indian writers surprised the mainstream literary establishment by publishing an unprecedented range of innovative poetry, autobiography, fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and mixed-genre works of undeniably high quality. Neither ''American literature'' nor ''American Indian literature'' would ever mean quite what they had in the past, and the assumed distinctions between these categories - written vs. oral or transcribed, sophisticated vs. primitive, familiar vs. exotic - were increasingly questioned by gifted and diverse Indian writers who not only published in all genres but, importantly, began to produce their own body of relevant scholarship. Although many individuals participated in this explosion of Native writing, it is the Kiowa and Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday who is credited with inaugurating this period as the beginning of a contemporary ''renaissance'' for American Indian literature. Momaday’s reputation was secured in 1969, when his provocative debut novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and captured the attention of critics. For the first time, the dominant culture in the United States formally acknowledged that twentieth-century American Indians could produce a written literature that was intellectually demanding and “serious.” Early critics noted the novel’s sophisticated techniques of narration and they were intrigued by the novel’s depiction of social alienation in its Indian protagonist and his desperate need to recover a viable identity within his community. These themes resonated with non-Indian audiences of the time, and they could be labeled as “modern” and “universal” rather than exclusively “Indian.” The novel’s striking ambiguities, however, are clearly anchored in its Native contexts, and the difficulty of resolving these ambiguities has insured a steady stream of response by two generations of readers and scholars.

In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact on the historical development of the United States. Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as determinants of American-rather than specifically Native American-literature. The notion that the presence of Indian peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored. In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin probes the complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination. Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, William Apess' A Son of the Forest, and little known works such as colonial Indian conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that Walden addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and whites; that William Bartram's Travels encodes competing and interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the nation. The Demon of the Continent proves Indians to be actors in the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and interchange.

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.

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...

“To Refute Mr. Jefferson’s Arguments Respecting Us”Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and the Politics of Early African American Literature Gene Andrew Jarrett (bio) Describing the political genealogy of early African American literature potentially opens the proverbial can of worms, if a 2006 roundtable published in Early American Literature is any indication. Titled “Historicizing Race in Early American Studies,” and featuring the eminent scholars Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian, the roundtable reveals the fault lines of disagreement not only on how to historicize race but also on how to historicize its politics. The journal’s current editor, Sandra M. Gustafson, had invited the roundtable scholars “to think about the theoretical implications of their work for an understanding of ‘race’ in the early period” (310). In response, the scholars outline their methodologies of race and literary history by reciting and elaborating the arguments of their books, all published in 2003: Brooks’s American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures, Gould’s Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, and Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America. To begin the debate, Brooks argues that the philosophical and practical impact of race on oppressed groups was quite evident. The very racial “concepts of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Indianness’ were essentially Euro-American inventions imposed upon people of color of various African and indigenous American ethnic affiliations to advance the economic and political dominance of whites” (315). Gould does not necessarily underplay this racial impact, but he does suggest that the meaning of race itself demonstrates a “far greater elasticity” than what Brooks permits (323). Interpreting “race in context of the historical formations of sentimentalism and capitalism,” [End Page 291] Gould considers the mutual influence of transnational and transgeneric literatures, on the one hand, and “ideologies of race that are themselves unstable,” on the other (322).1 Above all, the particular studies of Brooks and Gould proceed from different assumptions on the ideological construction and material tractability of race in early America. Measuring the tractability of race leads to a submerged, though no less important, disagreement between Brooks and Gould on the criteria by which we should assemble a literary archive of early America. Should we examine the lives and literatures of the alleged perpetrators of racial discrimination, or those of the alleged victims, in order to historicize race? What is at stake in studying white imaginations of race as opposed to black experiences of racism? Gould rightly points out that cataloging the archive merely in these terms neglects the ideological infection of racism across the minds and actions of both whites and blacks. Yet Brooks also correctly asserts that reducing racism to merely an ideology threatens to ignore its practical or material devastation of minority groups. Despite their different approaches to historicizing race, Brooks and Gould agree that the racial paradigm of human difference stood at the center of how the authors and subjects of primary texts negotiated, accumulated, and allocated political power in the early republic. Gould senses this agreement when he asks, “What does it mean, for example, to say that [Phillis] Wheatley is ‘free’? Or that she emancipates herself as a writer? The field is still in the process of engaging such questions. I would argue, as I think Brooks does, that addressing such questions necessitates thinking through the different registers on which the very terms ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’ signified” (325). Just as relevant, we must study how early American literature served as the site of such thought, in which race, nature, slavery, politics, emancipation, liberty, and citizenship are defined in their contemporary terms, not retrofitted from our own. If we accept this precaution, how do we establish the political value and genealogy of early African American literature? In this essay, I argue that before we can ascertain that early African American literature is political insofar that it has confronted racism, and before we can reach conclusions on the political motives, effects, and success of this corpus of texts, we should take a closer look at how the notions of literature and politics themselves resonated in early American debates. These debates involved white and...

Book Review| September 01 2006 Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953 Riché Richardson Riché Richardson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 627–629. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-033 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Riché Richardson; Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953. American Literature 1 September 2006; 78 (3): 627–629. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-033 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Within the literary connections between Australia and the United States, the more traditional notion of “influence” gained a different kind of intellectual traction after the “transnational turn.” While the question of American influence on Australian literature is a relatively familiar topic, the corresponding question of Australian influence on American literature has been much less widely discussed. This bi-continental interaction can be traced through a variety of canonical writers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Brockden Brown, through to Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain. These transnational formations developed in the changed cultural conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, with reference to poets such as Lola Ridge, Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with novelists such as Christina Stead, Peter Carey, and J. M. Coetzee. To adduce alternative genealogies for both American and Australian literature, Australian literature might be seen to function as American literature’s shadow self, the kind of cultural formation it might have become if the American Revolution had never taken place. Similarly, to track Australian literature’s American affiliations is to suggest ways in which transnational connections have always been integral to its constitution. By re-reading both Australian and American literature as immersed within a variety of historical and geographical matrices, from British colonial politics to transpacific space, it becomes easier to understand how both national literatures emerged in dialogue with a variety of wider influences.

The Legacy of Joe Skerrett John Wharton Lowe (bio) I was devastated last summer when my dear friend Joe Skerrett suddenly left us; his legacy, however, of brilliant scholarship and teaching, and his generosity and greatness of spirit, remains. One of the greatest achievements of his long and productive career was winning the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Distinguished Retiring Editor Award. As they recognized, his editorship of MELUS was heroic, path-breaking, and immensely influential. During his twelve years at its helm, what was once an obscure journal with limited circulation became the leading periodical in the field of ethnic literary studies. He charted new paths, alternating “Varieties of Ethnic Criticism” editions with focused issues on topics such as Native American Literature, Asian American Literature, and Ethnic Women’s Literature. He charged scholars of various subsets of ethnic literary study to edit special editions devoted to Ethnic Humor, Irish American literature, Italian American literature, Ethnic Sexualities, Religion and Ethnic Literature, and Ethnicity and Critical Theory. Under his leadership, the journal reached an ever increasing spectrum of readers and scholars, and as a result played a crucial and often underappreciated role in our national discourse about ethnicity, folkculture, immigration, postcolonial writing, and many other related subjects. Joe also challenged contributors to compose cross-ethnic essays; he thereby strengthened necessary ties between scholars of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds, and fomented and complicated urgently needed discourse between and among cultures. The many graduate students he trained are keeping his legacy burning bright. He is remembered by his MELUS family—and I am quoting colleagues here—as “kind,” “generous,” “a gentleman,” “a great listener,” “a wise counselor.” He was also an engaged and wise society President. Since Joe was my best conference buddy, and we attended probably hundreds of panels together, I can affirm that he always listened carefully to presentations and often posed tactful, helpful questions; further, as MELUS editor, he would ask thrilled graduate students to send their papers to his desk for possible publication. My adventures with Joe covered many cities, at conferences both in the United States and abroad. He frequently traveled with me and my wife June before or after these conferences, in locales as diverse as Italy, Hawaii, Belgium, and France. He loved opera, blues, jazz, and theater, and was a celebrated chef. Evenings at his charming home in Belchertown were full of laughter, great food, circulating music, and wonderful stories. He gloried in his garden, his circle of friends, and his beloved relatives. This last time I saw him, at the April MELUS conference I hosted here at UGA, he was full of tales about his latest adventures and was making excited plans for the future. [End Page 6] The Estonian composer Arvo Part was once asked to name his favorite instrument; he replied “the human heart in tune.” Joe, whether he was in the classroom, at a conference, in his garden or kitchen, or at a concert, was always “in tune,” and he brought new perceptions and harmonies to everyone he encountered. The music of his life will reverberate for many of us for years to come. Click for larger view View full resolution Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. Photograph courtesy of Archie J. Brown Collection [End Page 7] John Wharton Lowe JOHN WHARTON LOWE is the Barbara Methvin Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is author of a number of books on Southern, African American, and Caribbean literature, the most recent being Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Chinese Anthologies of American Literature, Multiculturalism, and Cultural Import-Export Qin Dan (bio), Joe Lockard (bio), and Shih Penglu (bio) Discussions of the anthology genre need to emphasize the genre's scale of importance. Understanding the centrality of the anthology genre as a foreign language and cultural teaching vehicle can illuminate that importance. For many non-native readers encountering English or American literatures, the anthology is either the basic or an exclusive means of access, using selected short texts or excerpts rather than complete novels, dramas, or non-fiction prose volumes. For these readers, a literature anthology replaces the variety of texts that native English speakers would ordinarily employ in their studies. The anthology genre mediates foreign-ness to readers for whom English-language narrative is alien. The importance of anthologies grows as the likelihood of classroom exposure to a wider range of literature diminishes. Theoretical discussions have addressed American literature anthologies as artifacts of nationalism, racial exclusion, gender discrimination, and their interrelationships (Lockard and Sandell 2008). These editorial ideologies emerged in the context of the use of anthologies by Americans attempting to define, assemble and explicate their own literary traditions. Yet today "to discuss the 'American-ness' of American literature is to discuss minority discourse of the United States" (Lockard and Sandell 2008, 230). Contemporary American literature anthologies have paid particular attention to cultural groups that have been denied citizenship or equal rights, have been economically or socially marginalized, or have been suppressed by means of law. These anthologies range from the first African American literature anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) edited by James Weldon Johnson, to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's foundational Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The English Tradition (1985), to early compendia of gay literature such as Winston Leyland's Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology (1975). U.S. literature anthologies are not only for domestic readers: they are created, published, read, heavily used, and exert influence far beyond the [End Page 277] borders of the United States. What is the relationship between U.S.-published American literature anthologies and those published elsewhere in the world? Is this a heavily dependent relationship, copying prevailing organization and selections of standard American literature anthologies, or is it a more autonomous relationship that adapts, explicates, and shines a different ideological light over the landscape of American literatures? As with so much U.S. culture, have American literature anthologies become a product that replicates American cultural self-positioning and values? Might there be a reflexive reception through which these anthologies are re-invented to mediate both Chinese and U.S. cultures? Anthologies are the primary and often exclusive vehicle for American literature studies in China. Virtually all these anthologies are edited and published domestically, and few if any U.S.-published anthologies are employed in university classrooms. There are two classes of American literature anthologies—a) "indigenous" anthologies published locally, and b) anthologies from trade publishers or UPes. Anthologization practices in China are complicated by use of the term "English" to cover both English and American literatures and by creation of mixed American-English anthologies. Frequently a mixed anthology contains near-entirely American literature, or even in the case of Hong Zengliu's American Fiction: The Canons of British and American Literature (2003), contains only American literature despite the appearance of "British" in the title. We shall discuss this second class in terms of both entirely American literature anthologies and mixed American-English anthologies. The frequent collapse of a distinction between "American" and "British" literature indicates a destabilization of these national categories in "English" anthologies published in China. After reviewing the modern history of Chinese anthologies of American literature and their editorial ideologies, we will discuss selected examples as they relate to multiculturalism. We will conclude with a theorization of the uses of U.S.-style multiculturalism in Chinese-produced anthologies of American literature. The argument that will emerge, broadly phrased, is that Chinese anthologies of American literature tell us as much or more about China as they do about the United States or American literature. The present study locates itself within the context of Chinese-U.S. comparative studies, especially as they...

Reviewed by: Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature by Brian Norman Éva Tettenborn Brian Norman. Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. viii + 223 pp. In Dead Women Talking, Brian Norman focuses on the “evolution of dead women talking into a full-fledged American literary tradition by the later twentieth century” (20). Norman investigates how the talking dead woman can claim the status of citizen, albeit dead, and to what extend her peculiar speech act occurs at moments “when [women characters’] experiences of death can address an issue of injustice that their communities might prematurely consign to the past” (1). To this end, Norman examines eleven works of American literature frequently taught in college courses: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, selected stories from Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman.” Following an introduction that traces initial manifestations of the tradition of the talking dead woman to authors such as Emily Dickinson, he dedicates one chapter to each work, discussing Kingston’s work in the chapter that serves as conclusion. The book’s breadth of works surveyed invites readers to consider the trope of the talking dead woman across a variety of literary periods and genres. Norman succeeds in establishing his argument that the figure of the talking dead woman has been employed consistently to address social concerns of the respective time periods when the works were published. Thus, for example, he examines Walker’s use of Zora Neale Hurston during a period of reclaiming African American culture and literature or Castillo’s portrayal of the detrimental impact of greed on both contemporary society and the environment. Norman concedes that the works he examines meet his criteria of linking dead women’s speech to the pursuit of social justice to varying degrees. Particularly engaging is Norman’s choice of Faulkner’s work compared to its rewriting, Parks’s novel. In his comparative analysis of both works in the Parks chapter, Norman illustrates how Parks reimagines the literary tradition of the talking dead woman as a revision of Faulkner’s modernist aesthetic. This comparison is perhaps Norman’s strongest illustration of the existence of a coherent literary tradition that consciously employs the figure of the talking dead woman. About his critical and theoretical approach to the topic Norman admits that his “method throughout the book is primarily text [End Page 568] driven” and that the discussion’s “apparatus varies by chapter,” but he points out that “the argument remains consistent: these dead women seek posthumous citizenship” (17). While many readers will welcome the literary discussion’s focus on a larger number of works, some might also wish for a more defined, overarching thesis grounded in a theoretical apparatus that applies to all of the readings (for example, through a more sustained engagement with feminist criticism or theories of trauma, grief, and mourning). Many scholars will no doubt find useful points of departure in Norman’s work for their own research, and the book functions as an invitation and a road map for those who wish to embark on their own exploration of the topic in literary criticism. In his exploration of dead women characters, Norman carefully distinguishes the object of his study from the related figure of the ghost. As he clarifies, venturing beyond the role of the haunting figure, talking dead women “seek a place within their communities and often the legal apparatus itself” (8) while rejecting “familiar tropes of gothic, horror, and mythic modes” (9). Ultimately, Norman’s discussion suggests that the talking dead woman advances a transgressive political agenda, while the ghost as a presence may seem more enigmatic and incidental, allowing haunted communities to essentially dismiss the phenomenon rather than engage it. For example, he sums up...

As several contributors to this issue have noted, the field of early American literary studies was born with the “Puritan origins” model in which the significance of early American (particularly Puritan New England’s) literary and cultural productions was often appreciated mainly in terms of what they contributed to the later national (literary) culture of the US during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the 1990s, however, early Americanists issued their “declaration of independence” from the literary history of the American nation-state, objecting that the proto-nationalist paradigm is anachronistic and had done a disservice to a full appreciation of the rich and diverse cultural productions of the colonial Americas, which included not only geographical and cultural areas outside Puritan New England (such as Catholic Maryland) but also geographical areas not now part of the US (such as the Caribbean or Canada). One of the ironies of this declaration of independence from the proto-nationalist “origins” model, however, has been that early American literature has once again become British. Early Americanists have redefined their field as the “literature of British America,” engaging in more and more dialogue with their colleagues, not in American but rather in English Renaissance and eighteenth-century studies, while their colleagues in these fields, inspired by the postcolonial studies movement, have been interested in issues of empire and colonialism. Although the rejection of the “origins” model in early American literary studies has greatly energized the field and its

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