American Literary Culture Research Articles

“Art for America's Sake”: Decadence and the Making of American Literary Culture in the Little Magazines of the 1890s

Decadence — the literary and artistic movement that insisted on the autonomy of art, reveled in the bizarre, artificial, perverse, and arcane, and pitted the artist against bourgeois society — is most strongly associated with fin de siècle British and French culture. Rarely is it associated with America. And yet, its popularity in America may well have surpassed its popularity in either Britain or France. That decadence was among Europe's most successful cultural exports to America in the 1890s is indicated by the rash of decadent Anglophile and Francophile little magazines that emerged in America in this period. Whereas Britain and France had a handful of decadent periodicals between them, America had over one hundred and fifty little magazines in the period from 1894 to 1898, many of them inspired by European decadent periodicals. What Gelett Burgess, founder of the decadent little magazine the Lark called a “little riot of Decadence” (Epilark) erupted all over America, from major centers such as New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco to smaller centers such as Lansing, Michigan, and Portland, Maine. Described at the time variously as fadazines, fadlets, fad magazines, bibelots, ephemerals, decadents, brownie magazines, freak magazines, magazettes, dinkeys, and so on, these magazines were founded by those one contemporary, Arthur Stanwood Pier, labeled the “brilliant cognoscenti and sophisticates,” the “American Oscar Wildes and Aubrey Beardsleys” of the period (quoted in Kraus, 6).Despite the pervasiveness of the little-magazine phenomenon of the 1890s, these magazines have been all but ignored in recent scholarship. Interest in American periodical history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has focused largely on mass-market periodicals and the development of consumer culture as in recent studies by David Reed, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Richard Ohmann, and Helen Damon-Moore.

Intricate relations: sexual and economic desire in American fiction, 1789-1814

Intricate Relations charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers: sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789 and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler re-creates and illuminates the larger, sometimes opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read. In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase intricate to describe the complex imbrication of sexual and economic relations in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief job of the moral historian, a label that most novelists of the era embraced. In a republic anxious about burgeoning individualism in the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the novel foregrounded sexual and economic desires and explored ways to regulate the manner in which they were expressed and gratified. In Intricate Relations, Weyler argues that understanding how these issues underlie the novel as a genre is fundamental to understanding both the novels themselves and their role in American literary culture. Situating fiction amid other popular genres illuminates how novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Samuel Relf, Susanna Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Sally Wood synthesized and iterated many of the concerns expressed in other forms of public discourse, a strategy that helped legitimate their chosen genre and make it a viable venue for discussion in the decades following the revolution. Weyler's passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's and American studies.

The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (review)

Reviewed by: The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere Caroline Levander The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. By Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 336 pp. $49.50. In this highly intelligent and elegantly written book, Elizabeth Maddox Dillon makes the important observation that U.S. liberalism depends upon the concept of gender for its successful functioning and, more particularly, that women's private status has been integral to liberalism since its inception. As Dillon goes on to make clear, such an observation is of immediate importance to those interested in American literary and political cultures, as well as to those working in political theory and feminist studies. Feminist critics, for example, have tended to argue that "liberalism is flawed insofar as it excludes women," but Dillon shows that "while it is indeed the case that the figure of the woman within liberalism often stands opposed to the autonomous, white male liberal subject," "this opposition is itself crucial to liberal thought and culture" (3). Such a shift in thinking about gender and liberalism simultaneously locates women firmly within the broad conceptual history of liberalism and reveals liberalism's deep dependence on those female citizens it seems to exclude. Further, such an analysis reorganizes familiar histories of liberalist theory, as Dillon demonstrates when she explains how early liberalist rhetoric was at work in both Ann Hutchinson's trial and Winthrop's strategic representations of it to an English public upon whom the Massachusetts Bay Colony depended for resources. After an adeptly argued introductory chapter on gender, liberal theory, and the literary public sphere, Dillon moves to a consideration of how the antinomian controversy, which has long been seen as repressing women, actually involved an intricate and extended negotiation of women's political power. Showing that the antinomian controversy marks the beginning of an institutionalization of liberalism, rather than its repression, Dillon persuasively locates U.S. liberalism's origins much earlier in the nation's history than is usually assumed. Such a rehistoricizing of liberalism—one that shows the centrality of women's assumption of prominence to the evolution of a liberal public sphere—is followed by a chapter on the importance of marriage to a developing U.S. political culture. Showing a correlation between marriage's development into an increasingly intensive relation between individuals and political culture's increasing decentralization, Dillon makes the important observation that marriage shores up liberalist structures by emphasizing heterosexual desire and thus emphasizing sexual difference. As she argues, consensual marriage's primary condition "seems to be the cultivation of desire for a partner defined in sex specific terms: one need not only find a partner of the opposite sex, but it is precisely their sex—their manliness or womanliness—that one must find desirable" (129). It is sentences like this that make The Gender of Freedom a pleasure to read. In her fourth and final chapter on sentiment and sociality, Dillon explores four infanticide narratives that precede and, she argues, help to produce nineteenth-century sentimental novelists' primary concern with the mother-child bond. Moving from marriage to motherhood, this chapter argues that the repeated trope of the [End Page 208] dead child in sentimental fiction works to "produce the freedom of the liberal subject through [the] affective abundance" created by the child's death (203). While it is certainly true that child death is a prominent theme in sentimental fictions like Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the fact that maternal death and orphanage seem equally important elements of other popular novels raises an important and unexplored question about female mortality's impact on liberalism. Similarly, the interest of this chapter in infanticide narratives brings to mind the many slave narratives that depict a slave mother's desire to kill her offspring as an act of maternal nurture, and one wonders, finally, about the place of racial identity within the model of gender and liberalism that Dillon generates. It is, no doubt, the case that women engaged with the gendered dynamics of a developing liberalist ideal in distinct ways, based on other constituting elements of their social identities. Yet a brief consideration of...

An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture; Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture; Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region

Book Review| December 01 2004 An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture; Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture; Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region By Edward Watts. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press. 2002. xxv, 285 pp. $55.00.By Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2003. 422 pp. $44.95.By Audrey Goodman. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press. 2002. xxix, 224 pp.$40.00. Sandra Zagarell Sandra Zagarell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2004) 76 (4): 894–897. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-76-4-894 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sandra Zagarell; An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture; Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture; Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region. American Literature 1 December 2004; 76 (4): 894–897. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-76-4-894 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. 2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture Donna Campbell Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. By Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 422 pp. $44.95. With the publication of their anthology American Women Regionalists 1850-1910 in 1992, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse redefined regionalism as distinct from, and superior to, the late nineteenth-century tradition of local color, a theoretical position solidified in a host of critical essays over the past eleven years. In its elegantly argued theoretical framework and insightful, detailed close readings, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture stakes out an even more daring position: a radical restructuring of nineteenth-century American local color, realism, and regionalism, one that moves gender from the margins to the center of the debate over what constitutes literary value. Put rather too simply, Fetterley and Pryse's contention is that except for a certain sharing of subject matter, regionalism is fundamentally distinct from local color. It presents a critique of "aggressive masculinity" and "imperialist aggression" instead of the simple nostalgia for a vanished past offered by local color (30, 239); it tells "unconventional, noncanonical, and counterhegemonic stories of female (and male) development across the life cycle" (30); it abjures conventional plots and consciously embraces the sketch as its signature form; it is "inherently dialogic" and recognizes place, like gender, as being a "discursive location" rather than as an essential entity (37); and above all, it substitutes "looking with" and the cultural healing and empathic narration that that entails for the coercive and judgmental "looking at" of the local colorists (36). Like feminist discourse, which it resembles in being spoken through women's voices and subject positions, regionalism makes readers care about those considered "minor, deviant, queer, or crazy by the dominant culture" (144). Indeed, with the exception of Charles W. Chesnutt, the writers who meet the criteria for regionalist writing are all women, among them Sarah Orne Jewett, Zitkala-¨Sa, Mary Austin, Sui Sin Far, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Cary, and Mary N. Murfree. In establishing the boundaries of regionalist writing, Fetterley and Pryse present a number of arguments provocative and illuminating in their own right, beginning with the history of the movement. They contend that regionalism has an entirely different genealogy from local color, one beginning with Alice Cary and Harriet Beecher Stowe rather than the cruel humor of the Old Southwest, and, further, that literary history has reconfigured the origins of regionalism and local color to feature male authors and to contain it as a minor genre so that it could not challenge the primacy of male-identified realism. For Fetterley and Pryse, regionalism resides in queer consciousness, which they suggest may be variously defined as anything from a "shifting [End Page 96] signifier" used to construct "the normal" to lesbian desire (320). Further, they find the theoretical underpinnings of regionalism to be located in the stylistic features of the literature itself. For example, Fetterley and Pryse weave the phrase "free to say" from Rose Terry Cooke's "Miss Beulah's Bonnet" into their discussion of the neglected issue of theme in American fiction; in the story, the exasperated title character declares that she is "free to say" she never did like boys, a sentiment that the authors use to characterize other, similarly liberatory statements and motifs in the works. The framing description in stories by Freeman and interrupted narration in stories by Jewett likewise teach readers the sophisticated conventions of reading regionalism. In short, regionalism is less a literature of place than a literature of mind, an "eccentric" or literally "out of the center" space from which emerges a subversive counternarrative to the history of American realism. Despite their excellent analysis, Fetterley and Pryse's definition of regionalism as an empathetic, woman-centered genre will continue to be controversial. For example, the characterization of women's regional fiction as a nurturing, empathetic genre has already experienced challenges ranging from Richard Brodhead's characterization of Jewett as catering to tourist culture to Elizabeth Ammons's assessment of the "protofascist implications" of the Bowden reunion in The Country...

Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture

Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture

Literary Piracy, Nationalism, and Women Readers in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1850-1855

During the early nineteenth century, most books sold in the United States were foreign imports or copies. At an 1834 book trade sale, for example, of the 114 fiction books printed in America, 95 were English reprints.1 A reliance on British literature was facilitated by the lack of an international copyright law and what Laurel Brake has called "a vestigial, high cultural value attached to the ejected imperial power."2 However, America's nascent publishing industry was also shaped by what Meredith McGill calls a "Jacksonian resistance to centralized development" that kept the nation's book production system dispersed.3 This decentralization compounded and reinforced the young nation's lack of a strong literary identity and led to its reliance on imports from Great Britain for literary sustenance. British novels easily filled the bill for this decentralized system of publishers who struggled to survive by printing what was well-known and had a ready audience of consumers. American magazines were no exception: they took the culture of reprinting even further by adapting a wide variety of British publications for their own purposes. Despite a growing sense of literary nationalism, McGill contends that reprinting was the cultural norm for most of the century and was even considered to be proof of an enlightened democracy because it produced affordable reading materials for the general public and avoided monopolistic publishing practices. In fact, opponents of an international copyright agreement defined the manufacturing and dissemination of texts as America's primary cultural role, not the creation of original literature.4 Harper's New Monthly Magazine is the quintessential example of a literary endeavor that sought to adapt British literature to the establishment of a healthy and egalitarian publishing empire in the United States.5 While Harper's mimicked the survival techniques used by [End Page 63] many American publishing houses in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its preoccupation with creating a national literary identity out of "pirated" scraps of British periodicals signals a transition from national dependence on British culture to a more patriotic devotion to elevating the status of American literature during the 1850s.6 In this essay, I examine how Harper's repackaged and redeployed British literature for a nationalistic purpose, thereby participating in the nation's transformation from a culture of reprinting to a culture of authorial originality and nationality.7 Through what seems an unlikely appeal for a publication famous for its literary piracy, Harper's editors forged a patriotic message addressed primarily to women readers. While the magazine valued British novelists such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray over American writers, its focus on British authors was rhetorically constructed as nationalistic. The editors theorized that by providing the public with these examples of "excellent" high cultural texts, the magazine would raise the standards of American readers and, in turn, raise the quality of American literature. In this way, Harper's urged its women readers to nurture the next generation of native readers with the British literary models it provided so that they would eventually have the skills to both recognize and create a distinctly tasteful American literary culture. In order to understand how Harper's was able to build a patriotic message despite its reputation for piracy, it is necessary to determine how it became the most successful magazine in America between 1850 and 1855.8 Published at the beginning of the American industrial age, Harper's was produced at one of the country's first steam-powered presses located at Harper and Brothers headquarters in New York. The magazine rose to prominence due, in part, to its effective use of technology to create some of the earliest electroplate images in the nation. The magazine's editorial staff also brought status to the endeavor. From 1850 to 1856...

A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America

In his article "A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America," Mario J. Valdés addresses the well-recognized limitations of literary history as historical research. Valdés outlines the theoretical thinking that has guided the editors of The Oxford Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures to plan, organize, and complete the first history of literary culture of Latin America. The project is comparative, recognizing the radical diversity of the continent while at the same time it is an open-ended history that informs but does not attempt to provide a totalizing account of more than five hundred years of cultural development among the heterogeneous entities that make up Latin America. Valdés begins by considering the paradox of literary history, he then suggests ways that literary history can be shaped by the work of Michel Foucault, and he proposes a framework for a hermeneutics of literary history. Valdés also considers the challenges that face the literary historian whose work now includes cultural history. All of these considerations are then placed within the context of an effort to create a literary and cultural history of Latin America.

Translating Israel: contemporary Hebrew literature and its reception in America

Reflects the rise of literature in modern-day Israel and the problematic reception of literature in America and within the American Jewish community. Israeli literature provides a unique lens for viewing the inner dynamics of this small but critically important society. In addition, its leading writers such as S. Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua, among others, are recognized internationally as major world literary figures. Despite this international recognition, the rich literary tradition of Israeli literature has failed to reverberate and find significant readership or a following in America even among the American Jewish community. Alan L. Mintz traces the reception of Israeli literature in America from the 1970s to the present. He analyzes the influences that have shaped modern Israeli literature and reflects on the cultural differences that have impeded American and American Jewish appreciation of Israeli authors. Mintz then turns his attention to specific writers, examining their reception or lack thereof in America and places them within the emerging unfolding critical dialogue between the Israeli and American literary culture.

Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture

Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Acts Chapter 3 Vision and Tradition Chapter 4 Sexism and Racism in Vietnam War Fiction Chapter 5 Joe Haldeman and the Wounds of War Chapter 6 Vietman As Noise Part 7 Shadows Chapter 8 Vietnamese in America Chapter 9 Hard-Boiled Nam I: The Vietnam War in Detective Fiction Chapter 10 Hard-Boiled Nam II: James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux Chapter 11 Vietnam War Themes in Korean War Literature Chapter 12 Going Back to Go Forward Part 13 Coda: Teaching War Literature Chapter 14 Teaching the Literature of War or Teaching the War through Literature Chapter 15 Representations of War in Ethics Education

Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture

Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture

Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative.

Although the Vietnam conflict ended two decades ago, a fierce cultural war over how its literature is to be perceived continues to be waged. Warring Fictions accuses American critics of twenty years of whitewash and reminds us that Vietnam was not just an American anguish and its fiction a rock-and-roll acid trip. From the blind patriotism of The Green Berets to the postmodern hip of Dispatches this book brings history and politics back to the Vietnam War novel. It is a brilliant case study of canon formation and of the role commercial and academic literary institutions have played in assessing Vietnam War fiction; it exposes their complicity in the writing of recent American history and rebukes academic literary culture that speciously purports a radical calling for itself. Beyond an aca-demic audience, this book will challenge all who are piqued by studies of the war and of Vietnam War fiction. And it raises important questions about the interlocking interests and ideologies of literary culture, the publishing industry, the mass media, and the academy. With its exemplary command of actual history and its well-documented investigation of the Vietnam fiction canon, this book throws a probing light on a literary culture whose tastes and attitudes have helped enforce a conservative interpretation of the war. In extraordinary readings of The Quiet American, The Ugly American, The Prisoners of Quai Dong, The Laotian Fragments, Dispatches, The Things They Carried, and In Country, Warring Fictions provides a radical historical perspective on the fiction that emerged from the Vietnam War. Jim Neilson is an instructor in the department of arts and sciences at Trident Technical College.

Gloom and Doom in Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee , from Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur

Taylor Roberts' recovery of Mark Twain's own copy of Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur rekindles questions concerning Twain's process of composing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.(1) As a specialist in medieval English literature, I wish to document more minutely than have Americanists Twain's use of his direct source, purchased in 1884. This article will compare Twain's experience of reading the unabridged Morte Darthur to his expectations primarily based on its condensation as The Boy's King Arthur, which he had owned since 1880. This comparison can help circumscribe the impact on American literary culture of idealizing Europe's past--that is, of the phenomenon now termed medievalism.(2) Connecticut Yankee retains evidence of one significant moment in diachronic literary change, which seems so often to lurch onward just out of sight, like Malory's questynge beeste. Our glimpse of that moment occurs at the oft-discussed disjunction between the first and second paragraphs of chapter 21 of Connecticut Yankee. I suggest that in 1887-88, at some point in between the two summers when he wrote those two paragraphs, Twain finally faced up to amoral nihilism in the real Morte Darthur and therefore, according to the best information then available to him, in the real Middle Ages. A time frame is well established for the composition of Connecticut Yankee. Early in 1886 Twain wrote the opening frame and chapters 1-4; during the summer of 1887 chapters 5-9, 11-20, and the beginning of 21; then one year later the remainder.(3) After the first paragraph of chapter 21, the novel's plot and comic tone collapse. Thereafter loosely linked episodes writhe with inconsistent characterization, vacillating objects of mockery, and gratuitous bloodshed. Scholars have documented external events that could have affected what Twain wrote during the summer of 1888: family illness, financial problems (notably overinvestment in the Paige type-setting machine), national or international politics, and his musings about capitalist industrialization, a trip downriver in 1882, or a visit to Hannibal in 1885. Scholars document also Twain's relevant reading, including History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, other historical and scientific works, fantasy stories by Max Adeler, an attack on America by Matthew Arnold, a magazine series on Russian atrocities, and pseudo-medieval fiction, notably that by Miguel de Cervantes (beloved by Twain) and Walter Scott (detested).(4) In addition to these other factors, I propose, Twain during 1887-88 finally found time to finish reading the whole of Morte Darthur, in the mass-marketed Globe edition he purchased December 6, 1884.(5) The course of composition of Connecticut Yankee reflects not only outside events and readings but also Twain's escalating disillusionment with his primary source text. As one result to be discussed, his novel's Last Battle feels horrific even to readers familiar with its far gorier prototype: the civil war that destroyed legendary Camelot. In its entirety, Malory's very long book came to confirm what Twain began to suspect while reading its opening chapters, on Sundays and trains during a lecture tour. Le Morte Darthur stands solid witness against any Golden Age of childlike innocence. From Malory Twain learned that the alleged glory days of British chivalry provide no admirable heroes, no moral or ethical standards, no inspirational ideals. Contrary to medievalism's rose-colored reconstruction of the Middle Ages, contrary to the pure-hearted world created in meticulous excerpts for The Boy's King Arthur, contrary to the Globe edition's effusive introduction, Twain discovered for himself that King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table lie and cheat and steal and make solemn vows intending to break them. They casually commit rape and adultery, betray friends and feudal lords, seek blood revenge contrary to law, shrug aside the slaughter of women, children, kin, innocent bystanders, and each other. …

Gritos desde la Frontera: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Postmodernism

Journal Article Gritos desde la Frontera: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Postmodernism Get access Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak Texas A&M; Corpus Christi Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 25, Issue 2, June 2000, Pages 101–118, https://doi.org/10.2307/468221 Published: 01 June 2000

At Home in Exile: The Living Paradoxes of Moyshe Nadir's Early 20th-Century American Yiddish Satire (Discussion and Translation)

Moyshe Nadir [Itskhak Reiz] had been editing and contributing to humorous newspapers, Der yidisher gazlen, Der kibitser and Der groyse kundes [The Jewish Robber, The Kibitser and The Big Prankster] for several years when three-volume collection, Humor un satire, appeared in New York in 1912, containing Nadir's earliest satires. Nadir wrote at least thirty of sketches appearing in collection, under names Itskhok Rayz, Moyshe Nadir, Itskhak Ben-Meyer and Rinaldo; some of other pseudonyms may be his as well. This fertile exuberance and clowning, even at supposedly authoritative level of declaring authorship, reflects young Nadir's cheerful, iconoclastic attitude towards hybrid nature of American Yiddish-speaking community at time, and complexities of writing for such community. The audience for American Yiddish satire between 1905 and 1914 was an unprecedented mixture of rural peasants, urban workers, small shopkeepers, and radical intellectuals who had once been spread out across old European continent and who therefore spoke numerous variant forms of Yiddish, but who were now crammed into shared space of North American cities. Using laughter as means of simultaneously criticizing and easing assimilation into American culture, Yiddish satirists writing for new urban American audiences were attempting to fulfill diverse roles, including those previously played in European Yiddish folk culture by Purim players, trickster tales, and badkhn's [wedding jester] parodies. But they also used laughter to teach immigrant population and to guide them in their dealings with complex problems of their newly adopted society. In Bakhtinian terms, ambivalent laughter of folk satire, directed at Jews entering U.S. society, also reaffirmed their participation in it.(1) This article will discuss four of Nadir's early satires in relation to two distinct traditions of Yiddish and American humor. It will explore how this immigrant literature represents and mediates interrelation of two cultures and how it contributes to development of American Jewish identity within American popular culture. Jewish humor has been an especially successful contribution to American literary and popular culture; indeed, one study found that 80% of most famous American comedians were Jewish (Janus). In contrast to Hobbesian belief that humor is largely matter of dominating and belittling butt of joke, Jewish humor, from Sigmund Freud onward, has often been viewed as being self-critical and therefore an indication of self-hatred, or as pseudo-masochism serving to deflect or deflate hostility, as internal corrective ... and as ironic reversal (victory through defeat, virtues out of supposed vices) (Mintz 4). would like to collapse these divergent definitions into following: Laughter, even allegedy self-critical laughter, can be one of most efficient and subversive forms of attacking one's oppressors. Laughing at yourself is laughing at others because subtext is, If can laugh this hard at myself, imagine how loud can laugh when think of A strong parallel can be found within African American humorous folklore, in which principal figure is the weaker individual, who uses superior cleverness to overcome stronger opponents, often through use of satire (Cook 111). For many slaves, deception was only successful form of resistance (Osofsky 26). In modem era, ability to turn Jim Crow laws into joke, often through gallows humor, like Dick Gregory's definition of Southern moderate as a cat that'll lynch you from low tree (Watkins 502),(2) bears more than passing resemblance to similar tradition in Jewish humor that even allows one to joke about charge of having crucified Jesus. This charge has resulted in centuries of persecution, torture, and death, yet one is able to joke: Little Gerda [says] to little Moishe: I am no longer allowed to play with you. …

Dave Etter: Fishing for Our Lost American Souls

Dave Etter: Fishing for Our Lost American Souls David R. Pichaske (bio) In critiquing the 1991 Heath Anthology of American Literature, Hershel Parker, himself an editor of the competing Norton Anthology of American Literature, suggested that many Heath contributors “seem to have gone hunting not to discover what good literature had been written in the United States but only to locate minority (including women) writers who had been absent from or poorly represented in previous anthologies.” In so doing, he observed, they neglected several significant genres, ethnicities, and geographies, particularly the South, but also the West and the Midwest. “The Heath advertising makes its highest claims for the diversity of the anthology,” Parker noted, “but diversity is just what I miss in it.”1 The dissatisfaction of one version of the American canon with a succeeding version of that canon is an old story, but Parker is correct in saying that 1980s reconstructionists wrote off “vast numbers of American writers,” including many of those who in their own times had been the most popular or the most respected, “the ones who had seemed to speak with truly American voices.” In fixating on race, class, gender, and sexual preference—which have become significant literary considerations—most critics ignored or underplayed age, religion, ethnicity (too often conflated with race), and region (both geographical locality and significant urban/suburban/rural distinctions). Insofar as the reconstruction sought a fuller understanding of American Literature through heightened awareness of cultural determinants, its reassessment remains, for these reasons, incomplete. Harsher readings accuse reconstructionists of replacing an edifice of considerable grace and coherence with something of a shambles. An even harsher interpretation is that the reconstruction was driven less by a quest after Truth than by such late capitalist market considerations as publication, promotion, and book sales.2 [End Page 393] In the junkbond market of literary, scholarly, and textbook publication, the South, the West, and the rural Midwest lag somewhat behind. Historically, they always have, and here is another old story: the neglect of regionalists (usually dismissed as “local color writers”) by the credentialed custodians of American literary culture. Polarities in this running debate are multiple and varied: native opposed to international or European traditions; philosopher- academics opposed to journalists, gentleman farmers and steamboat captains; the New York cultural arbiters against the rest of the country. But if literature is culturally determined, and the proper work of literary scholars is to examine the full range of cultural determinants, then their province is indeed the full range of American culture, including the tradition of Midwest village writers, from Twain and Eggleston and Garland to Anderson and Lewis and Lindsay and Masters to Lockridge and Bissell.3 This tradition, relatively prominent in earlier versions of the canon, has largely disappeared from the national academic consciousness. One hears little these days about “the Chicago Renaissance” or “the Revolt from the Village.” Twain and Anderson remain, diminished, refocused, Anderson represented in the current one-volume Norton by two stories: “Mother” and “Queer.” Later rural Midwesterners, especially writers of the 1980s and 1990s, became virtually invisible, including such women as Sue Hubbell, Carol Bly, Kathleen Norris, Linda Hasselstrom, and Jane Smiley. One of the more marginalized voices in adademia today is that of living male poets from the rural Midwest, including Robert Bly, who is usually relegated to the men’s movement. Not a single Anglo male poet born after 1930 appeared in the first edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Many names come to mind: William Kloefkorn, John Knoepfle, and Dave Etter, formerly of Elburn, now of Lanark, Illinois. In the 1970s and 1980s, Etter emerged as one of the Midwest’s premier poets. He won both Midland Authors and Carl Sandburg awards; his poems were reprinted in over one hundred anthologies and in eight foreign countries, including translations in German, Japanese, and Polish; his great work, Alliance, Illinois, endorsed by Raymond Carver as “hands down the most impressive long work of poetry I’ve read in years,” found its place among Winesburg, Main Street, Main-Travelled Roads, and Lake Wobegon Days in an essay on the literature of small town America written by an Austrian scholar and published...

Universal Aspirations: Social Theory and American Literary Culture

Universal Aspirations: Social Theory and American Literary Culture

Toward a Native American Nationalism: Joel Barlow's The Vision of Columbus

days at Yale, he shared their desire to proclaim American literary independence in the immediate post-Revolutionary period by drawing on indigenous themes and subjects. Of course, the project of distinguishing American literary culture from its British legacy could succeed only if it were acknowledged by both American and European readers alike, and so Barlow and his coterie were obliged to engage in a conversation with a European audience and to draw upon a European literary tradition while simultaneously rallying their countrymen to forge an American poetics. Such a dual purpose is at the heart of Barlow's The Vision of Columbus (1787), his attempt to write the great American epic, an achievement that was to be recognized on both sides of the Atlantic. But compelled as it was to address two radically different audiences, each with it own set of assumptions and cultural perspectives, The Vision of Columbus was destined to become a cultural battleground. Indeed, in his own choice of a representative American subject, Barlow displayed the appropriative strategies of the colonialist as surely as he did the authorizing confidence of the nationalist. Just as England looked to Roman antiquity for imperial paradigms, Joel Barlow scanned the Americas for a new brand of antiquity---one stamped with a decidedly New World charac-

Book Review: American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in American Literary Culture

Book Review: American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in American Literary Culture

Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies.

This volume celebrates the hybridity of American literary culture. Over the last decade and more, American literary studies have tended, with only a few rare and recent exceptions, to look at separate strands of literary history and tradition--African American or white, male or female, lesbian or gay or straight. Every contributor to this collection, no matter how widely varied the point of view in other ways, examines the dynamic relationship between mainstream and African-American expressive traditions in American culture. Engaging the work of writers from Edgar Allan Poe and Frederick Douglass to William Styron and Ernest Gaines, they concur in treating the color line as a site of cultural mutation where American identities are produced, not diluted, through acts of cultural exchange. The book draws new research into the rich, contentious, yet thoroughly pluralistic cultural equation that is American literature. Toni Morrison's ground-breaking lecture, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature opens the book, which then moves on to provocative essays by scholars who have heeded her call for a rethinking of American literary tradition, black and white.