Cambridge History Research Articles

Open-Ended Questions: Exploring Jewish American Identity in Theatre and Film in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

Open-Ended Questions: Exploring Jewish American Identity in Theatre and Film in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

Brian McHale and Len Platt (eds), The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature

THE Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature is surely one of the least postmodern books that has ever been produced on the topic of postmodernism, and it is all the more original and useful as a result. The volume’s austere grey and black book jacket will be as familiar to readers of other instalments in the Cambridge Histories series as the scholarly rigour and historical precision to be found between the covers. The aim of this collection, in no uncertain terms, is to ‘historicize postmodernism’ (11). Brian McHale’s and Len Platt’s argument is that ‘histories of the postmodern [are] entirely viable’ (4) despite the fact that numerous theorists associated with postmodernism, such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, have ‘had issues with historiography’ (1). ‘Enough time has elapsed’, the editors declare in their General Introduction to the collection, ‘for us to be able to discern more of the internal articulation of the “postmodern era”—its successive moments or phases’ (4) and to examine ‘the relationship between [postmodern] cultural practice and the broader politics of the period’ (12).

Editorial Preface

Editorial Preface David L. Howell One of my side projects is editing one volume of a new edition of The Cambridge History of Japan (CHJ). Depending on what one thinks of it and its predecessor, the new edition’s three volumes will supersede, complement, or perhaps just pale in comparison with the six volumes of the original CHJ, published between 1988 and 1999. Reading Pamela Crossley’s review essay of The Cambridge History of China (CHC) in this issue of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies has me thinking about the nature and purpose of the Cambridge histories. I spent my academic adolescence in the shadow of the Cambridge histories of both Japan and China. I did my graduate studies at Princeton University, home to the CHC and its lead editor, Denis Twitchett, as well as many contributors, including Willard Peterson, Twitchett’s de facto successor as head of the project. My PhD adviser, Marius Jansen, was both a general editor of the CHJ and the editor of the volume on the nineteenth century.1 I played a small supporting role in the editing of that volume: I helped to compile the index, caught a major gaffe in the proofs, and voted for “bakufu” 幕府 (over Bakufu or bakufu) to refer to what I now always call the Tokugawa shogunate. I was a compliant adolescent, more inclined to revere the Founding Fathers of Japanese Studies than pull them down off their plinths. Even during my occasional sullen-teenager moments, when I launched into marxisant rants about methods and presumptions, I overlooked omissions that jump out at even my greenest graduate students when they look at CHJ today. And some of the omissions I did notice— the failure to treat gender as a useful category of historical analysis, for example—were just making the transition from niche concern to common sense as the first CHJ volumes appeared.2 Given that the CHJ essays were all commissioned before 1978, I suppose it is no surprise that women wrote only five of the seventy-seven chapters in the [End Page 303] entire CHJ series—none in the volume I worked on. The long gestation period meant, moreover, that many of the essays were stale or even downright outdated at the time of publication, the important perspectives of scholars a generation or two removed from the Founding Fathers’ disregarded entirely. My fellow editors and I hope that our diverse group of current contributors, writing on a tight schedule, will help us avoid some of the problems that plagued the first iteration of the CHJ. I must confess, however, that we continue to wrestle with a question at the core of Crossley’s critique of the CHC: What is the point of a Cambridge history? Is “the primary objective of the present series . . . to put before the English-reading audience as complete a record of Japanese history as possible,” as the general editors of the first CHJ put it?3 I doubt that any of my collaborators would think to put it that way. So what do we as authors and editors hope our readers will get out of the books? Who are our readers, anyway? Many authors of the first CHJ seem to imagine the reader as an outsider to the field in need of a quick (well, not too quick—some of the chapters are close to a hundred pages long!) and intelligent overview of a period or a topic. Their deeply embedded arguments are clearest to those who already know the field well and can read between the lines of their just-the-facts-ma’am prose. I suppose we imagine a similar reader—a colleague in another field or a graduate student trying to contextualize a monograph—but I hope the new CHJ chapters will put their arguments closer to the fore and aim explicitly to point scholarship in new directions, even as they remain as readable and reasonably comprehensive as their predecessors. Footnotes 1. The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053...

The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems

The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems Jess Roberts (bio) Paula Bernat Bennett published her selected edition of Sarah Piatt’s poetry, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poems of Sarah Piatt (2001), over a century after Piatt’s last significant book publication, her two-volume Poems (1894). Recognizing the need to market Piatt in the twenty-first century, Bennett assembled poems whose aesthetic and political sensibilities would resonate with modern readers. The very qualities that rankled Piatt’s nineteenth-century contemporaries—her irony, ambiguity, and difficulty—are on full display in Palace-Burner and have animated and excited students of nineteenth-century women’s poetry.1 Despite her often adamant language, Bennett presents Palace-Burner’s version of Piatt as qualified. “It should be stressed,” she writes in the preface, “that this volume’s publication only marks the culmination of the first phase of Piatt’s recovery. Both the presentation of her life and the particular selection of poems should be viewed as provisional .… much still remains to be done before the full dimensions of her literary achievement and its significance can be assessed.”2 So even as she set Piatt before a new generation of readers, Bennett recognized that others needed to challenge and develop that initial vision in order to comprehend fully her work’s richness. [End Page 334] If Alexandra Socarides and Jennifer Putzi’s A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2017) or Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt’s The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015) are any indication, how we comprehend Piatt, and consequently nineteenth-century American poetry, is expanding. With Piatt now a household name, something that twenty years ago seemed all but impossible, scholars in these collections situate Piatt’s writing in the context of realism (Elizabeth Renker), children’s poetry (Angela Sorby), Southern women’s poetry (Bennett), and Civil War poetry (Faith Barrett).3 Elsewhere, Matthew Giordano examines Piatt’s engagement with and place in periodical culture; Mary McCartin Wearn charts how her poems concerning loss and motherhood evolved over her writing life; and D. Zachary Finch discusses her “ethics of maternal melancholy.”4 This scholarship makes visible the range and versatility of Piatt’s poetry and helps fashion an increasingly nuanced picture of nineteenth-century poetic culture and a significant maker of poems. While this analysis has complicated our understanding of Piatt and the world of print in which her poems circulated, the terms of Bennett’s recovery of Piatt—a recovery that values irony, anger, and subversion—potentially limit how we study her poetry. Such is the case with the study of Piatt’s poems about child death. In the introduction to Palace-Burner, Bennett describes the poet as “turning elegy into confessional” and “send[ing] up howls of pain … not to be matched again in women’s poetry until Sylvia Plath.” Later, Bennett writes, in characteristically powerful language, “Piatt’s poems on child death … fall within nineteenth-century sentimentality’s discursive parameters, but hers is a sentimentality turned in on itself, devouring itself in rage.”5 As Wearn has similarly demonstrated, Piatt’s sometimes furious rejection of the terms of sentimental consolation represents an important part of her literary agenda. However, the focus on that rejection has obscured the range of emotion [End Page 335] and response that Piatt’s dead child poems represent.6 Furthermore, existing studies of those poems have focused overwhelmingly on poetry the scholars date after Piatt’s children had died. Piatt lost children early and often: her unnamed infant in August 1873, almost ten-year-old Victor in July 1874, ten-year-old Louis in 1884, and her adult son Donn in 1914 just before her own death. But the writer’s personal experience of child death neither inaugurated nor concluded her self-conscious critical engagement with the conventions governing child elegies. This essay aims to expand and sharpen our understanding of Piatt’s dead child poems by foregrounding poems she wrote before and after the death of her son Victor. First, it considers a group of poems that appeared in an anthology entitled Little Graves (1876), a collection that is representative of the sentimental tradition of child elegies...

In the Parlor with The Cambridge History of China

In the Parlor with The Cambridge History of China

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. Edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. Edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher

The Cambridge History of American Poetry

The Cambridge History of American Poetry

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

The Cambridge History of American Poetry. Edited by Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. v+1306.

<i>The Cambridge History of American Poetry</i>. Edited by Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. v+1306.

MULTITUDESThe Cambridge History of American Poetry. Edited by Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt

MULTITUDESThe Cambridge History of American Poetry. Edited by Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt

Book Review: The Cambridge History of the Second World War. Volume 1: Fighting the War by John Ferris and Evan Mawdsley (eds)

Book Review: <i>The Cambridge History of the Second World War. Volume 1: Fighting the War</i> by John Ferris and Evan Mawdsley (eds)

The “Comfort” Of Critical Consolidation: Pedagogy, Ethical Alienation, and Asian American Literary Studies

Abstract This article proposes ethical alienation as a critical pedagogical practice by analyzing the neoteric critical consolidation of Asian American literary and cultural studies, a consolidation marked by the recent (and near simultaneous) publication of four major compendiums—The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (Lee 2014), Keywords for Asian American Studies (Schlund-Vials, Vo, and Wong 2015), The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Parikh and Kim 2015), and The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Srikanth and Song 2015). The publication of these four compendiums within the span of a year signals a pivotal moment in Asian American literary and cultural studies, one that both recognizes the institutional gains of the field and addresses the (in)compatibilities between the field’s theoretical developments and its pedagogical practices. This article considers the centrality of ethics to a postidentity Asian American studies, suggesting how ethical alienation—signaled both by the figuration of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni and our own estrangement from it—can create productive classroom and metapedagogical practices in the study of Asian American literature. By attending to the field’s consolidations around a set of pedagogical and scholarly imperatives and analyzing that critical solidification in relation to “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni both as a figuration of “complex personhood” (Gordon 1997, 4–5) and as an interdisciplinary “term of analysis and history rather than personhood” (Chuh 2003a, 9), this article argues that ethical alienation as pedagogical practice can lead us to a differently ordered set of disciplinary priorities.

Claude Rawson in conversation with Marjorie Perloff

PREFACEClaude Rawson has been called 'perhaps the best living scholar in eighteenth-century satire, and perhaps of British satire itself', and there is frequent reference in the literature to 'Rawson’s unassailable pre-eminence as Swift’s most challenging, exciting, and erudite modern critic'. In the words of Robert Alter, 'What Rawson bracingly demonstrates is that humanistic inquiry still can be, and deserves to be, an empirically grounded activity'. Before his retirement in 2014, Rawson was the first Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale, where he had taught since 1986. Before that, he was for many years (1971–1986) professor at the University of Warwick: while at Warwick, he served as Department Chairman and was the co-editor of Modern Language Review. Rawson has held many distinguished visiting professorships around the world, most recently in China, where he was born and grew up. He is the author of numerous now-classic scholarly studies, among them God, Gulliver, and Genocide, and has edited dozens of scholarly editions, individual volumes of essays, and series like the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. He is currently the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, now in process. In the 1980s, he was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, writing on a great variety of literary and cultural topics, and he continues to contribute to the TLS and other periodicals. Since retirement, Rawson spends much of his time in Cambridge.Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She contributed an essay 'Beckett in the Country of the Houyhnhnms' to the 2008 Cambridge University Press Festschrift for Rawson called Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy.The interview took place via email between Cambridge and Los Angeles, which is Perloff’s home, in August-October 2016.

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Post-World War II to the 1990s, Cambridge History American Theatre, Vol.3, Cambridge UP, 2000, xviii+582pp.

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Post-World War II to the 1990s, Cambridge History American Theatre, Vol.3, Cambridge UP, 2000, xviii+582pp.

Book Review: History of the Bible in the Early Modern Period: Euan Cameron (ed.), The New Cambridge History of the Bible: vol. 3, From 1450 to 1750

Book Review: History of the Bible in the Early Modern Period: Euan Cameron (ed.), <i>The New Cambridge History of the Bible: vol. 3, From 1450 to 1750</i>

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, written by Hana Wirth-Nesher

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, written by Hana Wirth-Nesher

Ancient Southeast Asia by John N. Miksic and Geok Yian Goh

Reviewed by: Ancient Southeast Asia by John N. Miksic and Geok Yian Goh Geoff Wade Ancient Southeast Asia John N. Miksic and Geok Yian Goh Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Routledge World Archaeology series. 654 pp. ISBN 978-04-1573-554-4 When opening a volume entitled Ancient Southeast Asia, one is inclined to ponder: 'How far does ancient extend here?' as well as 'What constitutes Southeast Asia?'. The temporal and spatial bounds of this volume and its subject are important. The 'ancient' rubric here extends from the earliest evidence of premodern hominids in Java some 1.6 million years ago until the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the arrival of Europeans and the emergence of the 'early modern' in the region. But what region are we referring to? The authors adopt an essentially modern definition of the Southeast Asia region, extending over the ten modern nation states of ASEAN, together with Timor Leste. This is fairly unexceptional in works on Southeast Asia, but as we progress into the volume, we encounter some broader contexts, with Southeast Asia being linked to many parts of South Asia and the areas which today we refer to as Yunnan. The Mongol incursions in the thirteenth century also extend the connections of the areas examined in the text. The volume's map of Southeast Asia (p. 2) appropriately portrays a region which extends north to the Yangzi River. This aspect of the appropriate 'scope' of Southeast Asian history will be returned to at the end of this review. Some comment must be made on the name which the authors have assigned to the area their book engages with. For reasons unstated, the name of the Southeast Asian region has been truncated throughout the text into 'Seasia'. Never having encountered this term before, working my way through the text, I found myself frequently wincing as I repeatedly encountered 'Seasia' and its derivatives 'Seasian' and 'Seasians'. Fortunately the volume has many desirable attributes which counter-balance the shock induced by these unusual terms. The authors, John Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, are Singapore-based archaeologist/historians, long involved in research on the Southeast Asian past, and their knowledge and skills have been melded in producing this very useful volume. Those seeking monographs or edited collections on overall pre-modern Southeast Asia have long had a rather limited choice of works on which to draw. From the studies by Cœdès in the 1940s,1 and by Wang Gungwu2 and Paul [End Page 131] Wheatley3 in the 1950s and 1960s, through the Smith and Watson collection in the 1970s,4 a base was established for an overall history of early Southeast Asia. Then came the works by Wolters,5 the Reid volumes,6 the Tarling-edited Cambridge History,7 and the Lieberman studies.8 More recently we have seen volumes and collections by Hall,9 Ricklefs,10 and Ooi and Hoàng.11 In terms of period, scope and aspiration, the book under review perhaps most overlaps with the works by Cœdès, Wolters, Higham,12 O'Reilly,13 and the Cambridge History. It transcends all of these, however, in terms of the amount of information conveyed, the studies incorporated, the ideas addressed, the integration of ideas and sites, and the connectivities which are brought into the narrative. Strangely, given the series under which it is published—the Routledge World Archaeology series—this volume is not overtly archaeological. In some books, the scientific data-driven nature of archaeological studies results in the overarching historical context being lost. That is not the case here as, within the 600 pages of the volume, the authors have obviously tried to foreground historical processes and trajectories, presenting supporting archaeological evidence within the scope of the periods and phenomena being described. The presentation is concise and the nature of the text suggests that the book was written with the idea that it could be assigned as a textbook in a university setting. The volume begins by introducing the climatic, geographical, linguistic and ecological aspects of the region before proceeding to the earliest evidence of humans therein and the subsequent development of agriculture, sedentary settlements, religious beliefs, metal-casting, and...

What is a Question?

What is a Question? Robert L. Caserio (bio) Those of us for whom teaching is part of intellectual life study the art of questioning, all the better to insure open-minded responses from our students or colleagues, as a complement to what we assume is our own open-mindedness. But is that assumption self-deceiving? It might be so, inasmuch as the framework of our questioning—questions must start somewhere—is identical with foregone conclusions. On their basis we can ask away, picking and choosing among the freely given answers we receive, in order to conform them—not so freely—to our predetermined convictions. I am reminded of a brilliant critical study of Joseph Conrad’s portrayals of scenes of interrogation: Coercion to Speak by Aaron Fogel. Inspired by Conrad, Fogel argues that all our discussions and dialogues, our searches and researches, are not as spontaneously open as we think. He knows at first hand what he talks about because he is a professor. In university practice, the very frameworks of our questions can make them synonymous with demands for answers. Perhaps there is no escaping the demanding nature of questions. I find escape difficult. I struggle to escape, nevertheless, by reading widely and promiscuously, trying to let my coercive frameworks go. Questions that [End Page 47] seem most worthy of the name are an unsecured adventure, beyond the limits of one’s research agenda. It is exciting to be captivated by questions that one comes upon by chance, propounded by sources not one’s own. To be sure, academic scholarship can scarcely afford such questing questioning. The demand for research productivity is interwoven with the demand for answers. Nevertheless, the arts of the present and even university life afford us examples of non-coercive questioning. In the domain of fiction one example is William T. Vollmann’s The Rifles (1994), one in his series of historical novels, Seven Dreams. “Answers are commonly considered wholesome,” Vollmann says, especially for the questions we bring to bear on history.1 In The Rifles Vollmann demands a wholesome answer to who or what is responsible for sufferings entailed by the search for a Northwest Passage. But his framework, a desire to bring the villains of history to justice, is shaken. His questions can’t be resolved in the direction he desires. “How inconvenient that there are no villains in this tragedy!” he concedes.2 He concedes as well the shakiness of all attempts to distinguish what is knowable from what is not. A truly open question is not insured against an unwanted outcome. But the outcome of shaken frameworks and unanswered questions need not be tragic. It need only be thoughtful, as Vollmann’s quest is thoughtful, in the best sense of thinking. An academic complement to Vollmann’s all-risking inquiry is to be found in Grant Farred’s meditation on racism and thought, Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (2015). Questioning how it is that his anti-racist discourse has Heidegger as its unlikely source, Farred, a Cornell professor, reminds us intellectual workers, “Every question is in itself an epistemological problem, because no one knows where the question, any question, might lead.”3 Robert L. Caserio ROBERT L. CASERIO is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is the co-editor, with Clement Hawes, of The Cambridge History of the English Novel (2012); editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel (2009); and the author of two books and numerous articles. Notes 1. William Vollman, The Rifles (New York: Penguin, 1994), 339. 2. Ibid., 383. 3. Grant Farred, Martin Heidegger Save My Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 69. [End Page 48] Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

The Cambridge History of China, Volume 5, Part 2: Sung China, 960–1279 ed. by John W. Chaffee, Denis Twitchett

The Cambridge History of China, Volume 5, Part 2: Sung China, 960–1279 ed. by John W. Chaffee, Denis Twitchett