Twentieth-century American Literature Research Articles

Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author In Twentieth-Century American Literature by Benjamin Widiss (review)

Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author In Twentieth-Century American Literature by Benjamin Widiss (review)

The Afterlives of the Author

Review Article| September 01 2014 The Afterlives of the Author Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature, by Widiss, Benjamin, Stanford University Press, 2011. 208 pages. Michael LeMahieu Michael LeMahieu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (3): 414–422. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-4006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael LeMahieu; The Afterlives of the Author. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2014; 60 (3): 414–422. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-4006 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 JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's Letters

Abstract This review essay explores the profound scholarly significance of the publication of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, a nearly 700-page collection scrupulously edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (Knopf, 2013). The volume contains 566 full-text transcriptions selected from the 3,000 Cather letters now known to exist and makes them accessible in print for the first time. Cather's will, executed in 1943, forbade not only publication of her letters but even direct quotation from them, so biographers and critics for decades engaged in a kind of shadowboxing as they sought to convey Cather's thoughts and feelings through the awkward constraint of paraphrase. Now that the testamentary restrictions have been lifted and this volume is available, scholars and fans can hear Cather's epistolary voice without traveling to archives. An extraordinary contribution to Cather studies, the Selected Letters offers much to anyone interested in twentieth-century American literature, women writers, or LGBT/queer studies.

John Updike, Now and Then

John Updike, Now and Then Wilson Kaiser (bio) John Updike’s Early Years. By Jack De Bellis. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. 2013. Becoming John Updike: Critical Reception, 1958–2010. By Laurence W. Mazzeno. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2013. John Updike: A Critical Biography. By Bob Batchelor. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. 2013. With the passing of John Updike in 2009, the scholarly work of assessing his life’s achievement has begun in earnest. For anyone familiar with the scholarly reception of Updike, this might seem like a strange claim, since critics and academics have been attempting to summarize and categorize his work since the late 1980s. Updike has been a notoriously uncooperative subject of study, however, mainly because he continued to write at his habitually breathless pace almost up to the end of his life. This extraordinary output seemed to hold open the possibility that he would develop in new stylistic and thematic directions [End Page 141] (as some scholars have in fact argued). At the same time, this sense of development and experimentation in Updike’s work is counterbalanced by his remarkable consistency, a reverberation of voice and thematic concern that make his oeuvre unmistakable and unique in twentieth-century American literature. These countervailing effects have generated starkly inconsistent evaluations of Updike’s career and a continuing pressure, perhaps stronger now than ever, to make creditable definitive claims about his place in literary history. The works I examine in this review, John Updike’s Early Years, Becoming John Updike, and John Updike: A Critical Biography, share a commitment to solidifying their author’s reputation and developing a synoptic vision of his career. While they take different approaches to this project, each of these studies struggles with what is perhaps the central difficulty of coming to terms with Updike: on the one hand, the writerly talent and sheer output of Updike’s work would appear to warrant strong claims about the universality and enduring validity of Updike studies; on the other hand, Updike has just as often been accused of sacrificing content for stylistic brio and emphasizing commercial success above other considerations. The popular success of Updike’s books has not always translated into prestige in the scholarly world or a general consensus among critics and reviewers about his merits. Whether this reflects more on Updike’s work or the academy’s assumptions still remains to be seen, but it is clear that today there is a renewed interest in the question of his literary legacy. Coming at the end of Updike’s life, the three studies I look at here struggle with the paradoxical features of Updike studies and, while it is not clear that they are ultimately able to reconcile the tensions that have stubbornly persisted in the evaluation of Updike’s life and work, they are important indications of the continuing promise of the field. John Updike’s Early Years opens with a frank meditation on the future of Updike studies. The book’s central claim is that understanding Updike’s childhood background will help the reader to evaluate Updike’s importance as a mature writer. In an otherwise well-structured and interesting book, the connection between these two themes remains tenuous throughout this slim volume, however, and many of the most suggestive aspects of his early life are hinted at rather than fully explored. The author, Jack De Bellis, moves uncomfortably between psychology, archival history, and reportage, with the result that none of these approaches develops into a consistent interpretation of Updike’s early life. Updike’s childhood experience with psoriasis, his stutter, and his awkward appearance, for example, are introduced as psychological themes, but we only read the reported history of overcoming these difficulties. In these and similar examples, the book is plagued by the continuing mystique of Updike’s success—that unshakable image of the wunderkind out of rural Pennsylvania who sprang fully formed onto the pages of the New Yorker. What is missing in this account is the depth that comes from a backstory. During his life, Updike was able to purvey an image of himself that was so blithe and natural as to seem almost naively two-dimensional. This ghost of happy...

Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's Letters

Abstract This review essay explores the profound scholarly significance of the publication of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, a nearly 700-page collection scrupulously edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (Knopf, 2013). The volume contains 566 full-text transcriptions selected from the 3,000 Cather letters now known to exist and makes them accessible in print for the first time. Cather's will, executed in 1943, forbade not only publication of her letters but even direct quotation from them, so biographers and critics for decades engaged in a kind of shadowboxing as they sought to convey Cather's thoughts and feelings through the awkward constraint of paraphrase. Now that the testamentary restrictions have been lifted and this volume is available, scholars and fans can hear Cather's epistolary voice without traveling to archives. An extraordinary contribution to Cather studies, the Selected Letters offers much to anyone interested in twentieth-century American literature, women writers, or LGBT/queer studies.

Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Widiss, Benjamin (review)

Widiss, Benjamin. 2011. Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $65.00 hc. $21.95 sc. 208 pp.In his new book, Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Benjamin Widiss concentrates on the risks and promises of death as a means for authors to achieve new relevance. Widiss is interested in the temporality of transitions and in how moments of becoming in a text are related to remembrance and the construction of authorial identity. Temporal dislocations such as belatedness are less a source of anxiety in Widiss's reading than a necessary means of achieving certain textual ends. According to Widiss, the author's invitation to the reader is to participate in acts of revision that end up obscuring the line between the author as a figure in the text and the writer, who initially appears to exist outside it, as the person who composes, revises, and publishes the manuscript. Widiss points to Foucault's sense of the death of the author as 'a constantly recurring event'-which immediately raises the question of finality (7). If the author becomes the object of the reader's search for authenticity-a search that the author invites the reader to carry out-then all that is necessary on the part of the author to avoid anachronism or stasis is to ensure that this search continues.Widiss approaches this idea through loosely associated readings of a series of twentieth-century texts that are all concerned with authorship, some of which are more closely related to his central ideas about invitation and obscurity than others. His reading of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in particular has more to do with setting out how textual meaning (and the sense of the author that lies behind them) emerges out of moments of remembrance and moments of enactment, and feels somewhat out of place alongside texts in which the author appears as a character, such as Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Widiss argues that the death of the author not only appears staged in these texts, but becomes central to the revitalization of the author's significance as a subject and as a figure that haunts the structure and meaning of a text. The question of the temporality of writing becomes a conscription of the reader, an appropriation of the desire for the author as the means of bringing that author into being as a fully realized textual subject. The death of the author here makes possible the author's resurrection: Widiss reads Eggers, for example, as turn[ing] the backward-facing genres of memoir and elegy into a forward-looking document (131). Authorship, and writing about the author, become the site of rebirth rather than of mourning.For Widiss, this idea of authorship is present in works throughout twentiethcentury American writing, so that the author is no less a deliberate construction in the early half of the twentieth century and no less an elusive figure at the century's end. Rather, elusiveness and invitation feature throughout, as part of the same process of creating the figure of the author. To some extent, Judith Ryan has gone on to develop Widiss's case here in her recent book, The Novel After Theory (2012). Ryan argues that works such as Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin put the death of the author to use in service of the narrative, as a knowing source of textual recurrence that complicates that death in much the same way that Widiss indicates (36-37). In this case and others, she sees post-theory writers as deliberately taking the death of the author as yet another narrative device. Ryan, however, doesn't work to connect, as Widiss does, these post-theory reclamations of authorial death with early twentieth-century efforts at developing new conceptions of authorship.The range of material that Widiss attempts to examine as a result of this connection at times presents problems for his argument. …

“Black Rage” And “Useless Pain”: Affect, Ambivalence, and Identity After King

This essay explores the psychic dimensions of post-civil rights black representation. I ask, what kinds of desire and identification, what vision of history and futurity, and what lost objects and forms of grief, drive nationalist approaches to black literature? In turn, what affective forces animate black literary and critical texts that are positioned, by will or by force, outside or against the contemporary black canon? I address these questions through analyses of two divergent narratives of the civil rights era loss of black leadership. I contend that this loss—marked most explicitly by the sixties’ infamous succession of political assassinations— functions as a crisis moment for black representation in both politics and culture. The stories that are told about this moment of rupture in turn work to imagine and concretize vying representational possibilities for a black present and future. In this essay, I juxtapose black nationalist responses to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination alongside Andrea Lee’s controversial novella Sarah Phillips, to explore how contemporary representations of blackness, imbued with the civil rights movement’s revenants of political longing and loss, are achieved, invoked, and disputed in late twentieth-century African American literature.

More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910–1960 by Amy Mattson Lauters, and: A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America by Janet Galligani Casey (review)

Reviewed by: More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910–1960 by Amy Mattson Lauters, and: A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America by Janet Galligani Casey Rachel Waltner Goossen More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910–1960. By Amy Mattson Lauters. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2009. A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America. By Janet Galligani Casey. New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. Two new works on American women and rural culture during the first half of the twentieth century, by communications scholar Amy Mattson Lauters and literary critic Janet Galligani Casey, illustrate divergent approaches to similar historical and textual material. While both analyze periodical literature, notably the nationally circulated monthly The Farmer’s Wife, which reached millions of readers, these authors reveal quite different intentions. Lauters’s More Than a Farmer’s Wife systematically reviews issues of this and other magazines of the era (Farm Journal, Country Gentleman, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping), to explore the publications’ representations of rural women. Based on oral histories and questionnaires solicited from approximately two hundred women who grew up on farms, Lauters finds both cohesion and dissonance between magazine images and women’s lived experiences. By contrast, literary critic Casey, who notes that her work is “less about the empirical facts of farm life than about its abstractions” (3), uses the periodical to set a contextual platform for the real focus of her work, novel-writing and photography by women that departed from stereotypical images of rural life. Of the two works, Lauters’s study of magazines and women’s remembrances of their farm experiences is comparatively pedestrian. “I wanted to know which was the more accurate image: farm woman as victim, or farm woman as a respected part of the business of farming” (153). She concludes that general magazines of the era largely ignored rural culture, while farming-oriented magazines lifted high the image of the respected farm woman. Meanwhile, rural women were struggling with the vagaries of weather, family circumstances, and shifting economic conditions as they sought to succeed as business partners with men. By 1960, Lauters reports that a significant urban/rural divide had developed, with city dwellers increasingly viewing farm women as “plain, unsophisticated and even a marginalized ‘other’ in American culture” (160) at the same time that farm women were deeply involved in the business aspects of agriculture. Lauters finds that American rural women in mid-century, while marginalized, nevertheless found validation in forming connections across the miles, communicating as readers and letter-writers of rural-oriented magazines. Her larger point is that long before computerized social networking offered community-building possibilities for people with similar interests, rural women were identifying with each other through the medium of nationally circulating periodicals. By contrast, Casey’s A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America takes as its starting point the pronounced marginality of both women and rural dwellers in the face of “a modern urban-industrial hegemony” (198). Nevertheless, she asserts that rural life remained central to Americans’ cultural images of themselves and their communities, largely because of the staying power of a Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, inherited and mediated over several centuries. Within [End Page 133] this context, Casey builds her work around the achievements of a small number of women who, in the face of rapid changes in agricultural technologies and economics, used literature and art to illumine and critique modern life. The first several chapters of A New Heartland are, at times, opaque linguistically. But once Casey moves to the heart of her study, an examination of literary novels (four bestsellers and three lesser-known, melodramatic tales of domesticity in country settings), a fascinating world of twentieth-century American literature, written by, produced for, and appealing to and beyond rural female audiences, emerges. Against the landscape of the more familiar literary works of Steinbeck, Cather, and others, Casey dips into the lives of writers Edna Ferber (So Big), Martha Ostenso (Wild Geese), Elizabeth Madox Roberts (The Time of Man), Gladys Hasty Carroll (As the Earth Turns), Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds...

Ghetto images in twentieth-century American literature: writing apartheid

Introduction: Living for the City: Reading Twentieth Century Ghettoes in Postmodern Times Love of Colour in Me: Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1928) and the Space of White Racial Manufacture To Make a Man Out of You: Masculine Fantasies and White Failure in Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) Jammed in Hemispherical Blackness: Looking Through Campy Transvestitism in Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn 'Enough to Make a Body Riot': Chester Himes, Melancholia, and the Postmodern Renovation In a World with No Address: Rescuing Ghetto Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place And the Arc of His Witness Explained Nothing: Black Flanerie and Traumatic Photorealism in Wideman's Two Cities Conclusion: Beyond the Manichean Literary Ghetto?

Joseph Fruscione, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry.

FRUSCIONE’s detailed exploration of the ongoing competition between these two giants of twentieth-century American literature is a rewarding read. He charts the duel from the 1930s, through an ‘almost’ meeting in 1947 when Hemingway and his friend Toby Bruce stopped off in Oxford on their way from Key West to Michigan and Idaho, through their deaths in the early 1960s, Similarities abound and Fruscione does an admirable job of exploring them in such chapters as ‘Brothers Shooting it Out’ and ‘Rivals, Matadors, and Hunters: Textual Sparring and Parallels’. Setting the scene for the rivalry to come, Fruscione situates each writer’s coming of age, both as man and as writer. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, Faulkner being the elder, each young man had tried to enlist in order to experience ‘the Big Show’. However, neither qualified for the American military and so Hemingway became an ambulance driver in Italy and Faulkner an RAF Cadet in Canada. Hemingway’s traumatic wounding is well-chronicled in both his fiction and biography; Faulkner fabricated a wound and was later a bit embarrassed by his embellishment of his military record. He wore an officer’s uniform and carried a swagger stick although he had only been a cadet. The discussion of early similarities, such as both returning home after World War I in the role of wounded hero, Hemingway’s wounds achieved during a battle and Faulkner’s in a drunken escapade is interesting. Both milked the role for all it was worth, an early instance of each performing his public masculinity.

The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels / Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature / The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History

Book Review| June 01 2012 The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels / Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature / The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels. By Gonzáles, Juan Morán. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2010. 146 pp. Cloth, $44.95; CD, $9.95.Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature. By Wyatt, David. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 2010. xix, 424 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $35.00.The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History. By Kreyling, Michael. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2010. xi, 223 pp.$48.00. Timothy Parrish Timothy Parrish Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2012) 84 (2): 454–456. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1587710 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Timothy Parrish; The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels / Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature / The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History. American Literature 1 June 2012; 84 (2): 454–456. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1587710 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. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Metalinguistic Discourse in the Contemporary Apocalyptic Novel

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua J. MastersJoshua J. Masters is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of West Georgia, where he teaches courses on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American Literature and African American Literature. His essays have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, American Studies, the Journal of Narrative Theory, and Critique.

Obscure invitations: the persistence of the author in twentieth-century American literature

Obscure invitations: the persistence of the author in twentieth-century American literature

Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

Book Review| March 01 2012 Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. By Heise, Thomas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2010. xi, 292 pp. Cloth, $72.00; paper, $24.95.An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America. By Connolly, James J.. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. 2010. xiv, 264 pp. $39.95.Bohemia in America, 1858-1920. By Levin, Joanna. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press. 2010. viii, 469 pp. $65.00. Kevin R. McNamara Kevin R. McNamara Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2012) 84 (1): 198–200. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1541031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin R. McNamara; Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. American Literature 1 March 2012; 84 (1): 198–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1541031 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. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

“All the time, somebody listens in”: mirror images of social paranoia in twentieth-century American and Soviet literature

Emphasising the manner in which literary texts often serve to express the collective hopes and fears of their respective cultures or communities, my research explores the representation of social paranoia in a selection of Cold War American and Soviet Russian novels. Although the antagonism between these two opposing superpowers, and their struggle for ideological supremacy, shaped the course of twentieth- century international relations, my research proposes that an examination of the literary and cultural output of these two apparently irreconcilable socio-political systems reveals a parallel preoccupation with a number of typically paranoid concerns. These shared anxieties include the unsettling reality of state surveillance and similar methods of social control, the ever-present threat of enemy infiltration, and the politicisation of science which resulted in the terror of the Nuclear Age. Indeed, much of the fiction produced in Russia from the Stalinist era onwards and in the U.S. during the Cold War ...

Three Feminist Interventions

Three Feminist Interventions Esther M. Lopez Avril, Chloé . The Feminist Utopian Novels of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Themes of Sexuality, Marriage, and Motherhood. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. viii + 199 pp. $109.95. Cook, Sylvia Jenkins . Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 292 pp. $24.95. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher . Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 279 pp. $28.00 Each of the texts under review here contributes to feminist scholarship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature by calling attention to understudied texts and by explaining why the concerns raised by the writers they examine are still relevant. All three studies are historically grounded, and each is centrally concerned with the way that women's bodily experience relates to gender and class expectations. In The Feminist Utopian Novels of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Themes of Sexuality, Marriage, and Motherhood, Chloé Avril explains why Gilman's views on sexuality, marriage, and motherhood, as presented in her utopian novels, still have much to offer today's feminists. In Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration, Sylvia Jenkins Cook compares self-produced representations of white working-class women in literature to those by middle-class writers. [End Page 363] Spanning the early nineteenth to twentieth centuries, this study traces working-class women's response to economic independence and their efforts to define their own physical and spiritual roles, thereby demonstrating the impact these women had on each other and society in general. Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture is an engaging demonstration of why "the personal is political." It collects a series of essays, many of which were originally published in other collections or presented at conferences between 1990 and 2004, that explore how writers from the nineteenth through the twentieth century have challenged existing literary and social conventions, thereby paving the way for positive social change. One such writer was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the subject of Avril's study and the focus of two essays in Fishkin's collection. Avril's study contributes to Gilman scholarship by focusing on the utopian novels that, with the exception of Herland (1915), have received little critical attention, and Avril explicates how they illustrate the social and political views Gilman championed in her nonfiction. After an introductory chapter that explains why the utopian novel is appropriate for Gilman's reformist purpose, Avril devotes a chapter to each theme she studies, and the connections she draws between Gilman's views and those of contemporary feminists are intriguing. However, her argument that Gilman's thinking regarding sexuality, marriage, and motherhood was often more radical than is commonly thought sometimes suffers because she does not sufficiently engage contemporary criticism of Gilman's racism and heterosexism. Avril's second chapter, "Sexuality," effectively advances her claim that Gilman was a more radical thinker than currently believed. Avril finds three areas where Gilman's views on sexuality continue to have relevance for contemporary feminists. Firstly, there is the idea that sexual liberation does not automatically result in social and political liberation; secondly, there is the idea that society still views sexual instincts as drives that must be indulged, and indulged in a heterosexual way; and finally, and most importantly, the idea that the power structure of sexual relations that Gilman critiques remains largely unchanged. Avril reads Gilman's utopian novels against second wave and modern feminist discourse as well as modern sociological studies of women's sexuality to help explicate Gilman's political views and establish their contemporary relevance. Avril distinguishes between "sex," which she defines as "the sexual act," and sexuality, which she defines as "the cultural and ideological way in which we experience and make sense of our intimately physical and emotional lives" (42). Avril does not propose using Gilman's views on sexuality, as represented in her theoretical writings and utopian novels, as a blueprint for how feminists today can solve these issues; instead, feminists may benefit from "understand[ing] the premises on which she based her analysis of (hetero)sexuality" (40-41). The "(hetero)" is important here, because although Avril advocates feminist critiques...

African American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century South

Two recent monographs argue that nineteenthand early twentieth-century African American literature works to represent and imagine black identity in ways heretofore unrecognized. In Fugitive Vi sion, Michael Chaney considers how antebellum African American au thors from the South—who had been or had remained enslaved—-turn to the visual to ruminate on the relationship of racial blackness to sen sory knowledge. Sherita L. Johnson's Black Women in New South Lit erature and Culture attends to the overlooked significance of regional identity in literature by and about southern black women. Chaney and Johnson offer compelling arguments for renewed attention to the rela tionship of African American literature to the South. In six chapters along with an introduction and a brief conclusion, Chaney demonstrates that black authors and artists contend with rep resentations of slavery common to the antebellum period by combining

Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature Mitchell Breitwieser (bio) David Wyatt , Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 400 pp. David Wyatt argues that twentieth-century American fiction had a predominant itinerary, putting forward imagined versions of what had actually happened in the course of our country's history, the horrific things, those which have been locked out of public narratives, the War in Vietnam, for one, "the iceberg that still cruises through our dreams." "Secret history," a term Wyatt takes from Michael Herr's Dispatches, offsets official histories, the ones the hunters, rather than the lions, write; or rather, since official history silences inconvenient testimony, secret history exposes hidden hiding, bringing the deficiency of the record into view by means of speculative fictions that teach us to feel how it might have felt to have been one of those caught in the grip of what really happened. If secret histories "commensurate with the unresolved and still urgent political and emotional burdens of the event" don't fully compensate for the intentional defects of official history, they nonetheless expose the lethal character of its innocence by raising the question of what hurt, and why, instructing us in the practice of an "attentiveness" to legacies that, left to our own inclinations, we might prefer to let lie, not troubling trouble till trouble troubles us. Secret history is therefore counterentropic and pedagogical, cultivating "the sort of open but suspicious mind that can divine the secret history any text worth reading hides in plain sight." I can think of a number of works worth reading that don't fit Wyatt's bill, but that doesn't really refute his point, because good literary history requires loose, serviceable generalizations, an acceptance of their provisionality, alertness to exceptions, and a disinclination to claim special majesty for the works that best support one's claim. Wyatt lives up to these requirements, and this talent for literary history is coupled with an acute exegetical ability: he is as a reader extremely sensitive to particular texts and to textual particulars when he zooms in for the close view, and that capacity for extended close attention to the writers that matter most to him, especially Hemingway, Faulkner and Morrison, working in tandem with his panoramic view of twentieth-century American fiction (fifty-four writers, by his count, are examined at various lengths), makes for a sweeping critical work that is compelling, always interesting, and often moving. If Wyatt's book is an expression of his "deep belief that American [End Page 598] literature is the secret history of the United States," he doesn't also claim that American literature isn't also something else, or many other things, and this argumentative modesty helped this reader at least to feel that Wyatt is largely right, largely as in for the most part, but also as in large in spirit. "Reading involves a take on something, a submission to the wonder of unexpected supply." Wyatt's book grows from his experience teaching a class on twentieth-century American fiction, more or less continuously, for thirty years now, he informs us, and his writing has the feel of having percolated up from a lot of strong discussion, the vigor of having come across the implications and the importances of novels in the course of passionate and reciprocal talking. It's likely that as a teacher Wyatt does the same thing that he does so well as a writer, getting his reader/student to see literary works as what William James called denkmittel, thinkwiths, mental tools that can be used to access still-current reserves of historical experience with special efficacy: "Absalom and Beloved continue to operate as forces in the American present because they implicate us all in the ongoing cultural and social disaster." We can see his characteristic teacherly quality in Wyatt's book's final words: "In this big and sometimes awkward book of mine, I offer my reader a version of my tradition. The point is not to believe me, but to continue the work. Still I am glad to have written these pages, happy that they now...

Secret histories: reading twentieth-century American literature

Secret Histories claims that the of the nation is hidden-in plain sight-within the pages of twentieth-century American literature. David Wyatt argues that the nation's fiction and nonfiction expose a secret history that cuts beneath the straight histories of our official accounts. And it does so by revealing personal stories of love, work, family, war, and interracial romance as they were lived out across the decades of the twentieth century. Wyatt reads authors both familiar and neglected, examining double consciousness in the post-Civil War era through works by Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. He reveals aspects of the Depression in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anzia Yezierska, and John Steinbeck. Period by period, Wyatt's nuanced readings recover the felt sense of life as it was lived, opening surprising dimensions of the critical issues of a given time. The rise of the women's movement, for example, is revivified in new appraisals of works by Eudora Welty, Ann Petry, and Mary McCarthy. Running through the examination of individual works and times is Wyatt's argument about reading itself. Reading is not a passive activity but an empathetic act of cocreation, what Faulkner calls overpassing to love. Empathetic reading recognizes and relives the emotional, cultural, and political dimensions of an individual and collective past. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.

The Early Writings of Joy Davidman

Joy Davidman’s place in the canon of twentieth century American literature deserves more attention than it has heretofore received. For instance, in her role in the late 1930’s as poetry editor for New Masses (the weekly voice of the Communist Party of the United States of America), Davidman published poets such as Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Alexander Bergman, and Aaron Kramer. At the same time, her poems in Letter to a Comrade (1938) touting a Communist agenda, while clearly written in the tradition of “proletarian literature,” are nonetheless well done; although a political agenda drives her selection of subject matter in these poems, they are not simply set pieces. She uses irony effectively and her imagery is evocative and striking. In fact, Davidman was very much a conscious craftswoman, spending the summers of 1938, 1940, 1941, and 1942 at the MacDowell Colony, a writers’ retreat in New Hampshire, where she honed her skills. For instance, her best piece of fiction, Anya (1940), is a direct result of her time at the colony. She understood the intellectual energy it takes to become an effective writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and she never backed away from hard work. Her commitment to writing—especially her voice, her rhetoric, her style, and the literary influences informing her work—merit more scholarly attention. In this essay I explore Davidman’s early devotion and commitment to the craft of writing; in addition, I evaluate the poems, fiction, and non-fiction she produced before she wrote for New Masses and published Letter to a Comrade.