US Literary Research Articles

The Armature of the American Novel: The Antebellum Sketch and Tale in Literary History

This essay calls attention to the genre of the sketch, which played a critical role in the early nineteenth-century US literary market. Later when developments in printing technology made it easier to publish longer works, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe used the sketch as the basis for hugely important mid-century novels.

Chronicling Contemporary Latinidad

Abstract Some of the most compelling and widely consumed US Latin@ literature being produced at the turn of the twenty-first century is literary journalism in the form of the chronicle, a transnational and transhistorical genre that draws on US and Latin American literary traditions. This essay elucidates the genre’s contemporary contours in the work of US Latin@ writers, including Héctor Tobar, Sonia Nazario, Daniel Alarcón, and Daniel Hernandez, whose lives and writings traverse multiple American borders as they cover issues like undocumented migration, narcopolitics, and cultural assimilation. The essay argues that an examination of how this genre portrays the present and imagines the future allows for an investigation into the current shape, possibilities, and limits of Latinidad as imagined by US Latin@ writers. Studying the chronicle’s genealogies, areas of thematic focus, modes of community imagination, and reception and distribution, the essay explores the ways in which US Latin@ writers are engaging the transnational literary imagination to intervene in historical portrayals, political debates, and the shaping of a Latin@ identity that is still under construction in the United States. It pays particular attention to the intersections of nationality, citizenship, and class that complicate concepts of Latin@ hemispheric unity.

On the Political Work of Children's Literature

Children's literature studies has been around for almost 50 years, its organizations, journals, and conferences dating to the early 1970s. The field continues to expand, drawing on and contributing to diverse critical and theoretical pursuits, and intersecting with fields such as folkloristics, comparative literature, Victorian literature, US literary and cultural studies, and interdisciplinary childhood studies. For better and for worse, the “professionalization” of children's literature scholarship has involved a rhetorical de-emphasis of its links to ostensibly more applied fields. “Children's literature,” remarks Francelia Butler disapprovingly in the inaugural issue of Children's Literature (which she founded), “is almost entirely in the hands of those in education and library science, who emphasize the uses of literature in the classroom, methodology, biographies of current writers, graded reading lists, book reports—good things but not the concern of those in the Humanities” (8). Butler and her colleagues energetically championed children's literature as bona fide literature worthy of serious attention. Summing up the scene in 1980, John Rowe Townsend saw a division between “book people,” or those interested in children's literature as literature, and “child people,” those interested in the kids themselves.1

The South Rises: Revenance, Region, and the Idea of Place in US Literary History

The South Rises: Revenance, Region, and the Idea of Place in US Literary History Peter Lurie (bio) There will always be someone to rise up to the south. —Gilles Deleuze (“Many Politics” 131) When Quentin Compton matriculated at Harvard in 1909, Faulkner and many others in Mississippi would have known that at that point, as well as in 1929, this was not the Ivy League school most likely to accept Southerners.1 As its most infamous President and alumnus illustrates, Princeton University was known in 1910s and beyond as the “Southern Ivy.” By the 1880s, Southerners in fact made up a majority of Princeton’s all-male student body. Before Woodrow Wilson, John C. Breckinridge, who attended Princeton before the Civil War, became a presidential candidate for the Southern Democratic Party in 1860 and, later, a general in the Confederate Army. Faulkner’s choice, then, to send a son of the South to Harvard is interesting. In light of his father’s declaration that “no compson has ever disappointed a lady” (SF 118), it may even appear anomalous. Quentin feels displaced at Harvard, a fact that informs his activities and attitudes in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! His responses to his cultural environment are due to the seeming strangeness and hostility he feels in New England, as opposed to what he might have found in the genteel eating clubs of Princeton, New Jersey. (“Tell about the South,” he’s admonished in Absalom [145]; in The Sound and the Fury he reflects, “a Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers. I thought that Northerners would expect him to” [57]). “Placing,” or rather displacing Quentin precariously in New England and in Cambridge, though, makes a particular kind of literary-historical sense. Doing so amounts to Faulkner returning to a site that figures in nearly any standard version of American literary history as its point of origin. It is the very prominence of New England and Boston, then, that later revisions of American literary history or of canon-formation worked against, including those of the New Critics who seized on Faulkner, most particularly when they sought to elevate Southern letters in the 1940s and ‘50s.2 The modernity of the Southern Renaissance, as has been pointed out, ironically contributed to the movement’s definition against such models as well as against the region’s and the nation’s [End Page 63] modernizing.3 The very notion of a Southern “renaissance” that the New Critics enabled implies a link to Quentin, at least as concerns his status in Absalom and his rebirth in New England after his watery perishing in the Charles River in The Sound and the Fury. Reversing the North-South Axis It is this displacing of New England by the South that certain versions of literary history perform, as does Faulkner’s own use of Boston or Cambridge. At the heart of this reversal of the “directionality” of literary history is what I might call a latent New England-ism in Faulkner’s writing, particularly that which attends details about Quentin and his experience in Cambridge. Faulkner’s and his antecedents’ Gothicism is often noted as a link between his “regional” modernism and nineteenth-century, Northeast writers, and I turn to that and other generic affinities below. Most specifically I will trace the sharing of a perceived darkness or perversity to the then-new Republic—the hauntings and threats that animate the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Brockden Brown—with Faulkner’s rendering of his native region, with Quentin’s own ghostly return, or “revenance,” itself an echo of these earlier figurations. Worth mentioning briefly first though are perspectives or tropes that appear in canonical New England works that recur in Faulkner’s fiction. Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” for example, stresses the value of a perambulatory wandering that characterizes Quentin’s journey through Cambridge on June 2, 1910.4 Perhaps more importantly, the essay includes a number of references to freedom, land ownership, and the provenance of literature and the modern, New World, ideas that inform key Faulkner works too. Thoreau inveighs against private property throughout the essay. At certain points...

Invisible Bullets: A Return to the 1910s in American Literary Studies

This essay-review considers Hazel Hutchison's The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War (2015) and Pearl James's The New Death: American Modernism and World War I (2013). It explores how these books open up the 1910s as a domain of rich, underexplored US literary activity and as a site of specific wartime experiences and discourses whose careful recovery freshly illuminates US fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. US literature and experiences of World War I, encompassing both militarized Europe and the US home front, receive particular attention.

“The Ache of the Actual”: Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

This essay examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century shared with influential religious ideologies including the New Thought an assumption that a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering represented the height of civilization. Theories connecting the civilizing process to an intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify the revulsion from physical pain increasingly characteristic of the era. Similarly invested in the eradication of physical suffering as a civilized ideal, sentimentalism deploys suffering instrumentally in the hopes of encouraging empathy as well as personal and political agency. Mediating between these anesthetizing and sentimentalist sensibilities, realists including Edith Wharton, Henry James, and William Dean Howells espouse an aesthetic sensibility premised on a sensitive yet restrained engagement with pain. They thereby challenge the prevalent association of superiority with a sensitive revulsion from pain while simultaneously evincing a deep skepticism about whether exposure to physical suffering could inspire social change. This essay first surveys the medical advances, religious ideologies, and consumerist tendencies that contributed to the burgeoning perception of painlessness as a desirable and increasingly feasible goal before examining the implications of sentimentalist intensifications of pain for identificatory and reformist purposes. It then explores realism as an aesthetic approach that distinguishes itself from these two distrusted alternatives by expressly depoliticizing pain while foregrounding its intrinsic sensitizing value. Analysis of writings by Wharton, James, and especially Howells reveals realism's investment in representing physical suffering as a catalyst for a ruminative, sensitive, and reticent responsiveness that the realists associated with refinement.

Transpacific Interpretations

Abstract: In this review, I look at recent texts by Yunte Huang, Hsuan Hsu, and Cynthia Wu on the transpacific literature and culture of the United States, noting how each of their books make significant and original contributions to this emerging critical field. All three books draw on transpacific methodologies (among other discourses) to generate fascinating new readings of well-known US literary and cultural texts, including—in all three critical studies—Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Although each of these books embraces its own method and scope, reading all three together provides a compelling snapshot of the development of transpacific American studies over the past half-decade, and suggests some of the new areas in which these methodologies are making critical headway.

Interview with Alan M. Wald on Sex and the US Literary Left

Interview with Alan M. Wald on Sex and the US Literary Left

Mary Howard ’s Mark: Children’s Literature and the Scales of Reading the Pacific

Mary Howard’s MarkChildren’s Literature and the Scales of Reading the Pacific Melissa Gniadek (bio) Nineteenth-century American literature’s most memorable tattooed body is undoubtedly that of Queequeg, Moby-Dick’s Maori harpooner. A key member of the famously diverse crew of the Pequod, Queequeg is also, as Paul Lyons has pointed out, a figure through which Melville “imagines, for a moment at least, the lives of an Anglo-US citizen and an Oceanian as twinned, through processes that are at once intimate, and nested within larger historical, economic, and political structures” (1). In that moment in “The Monkey-rope chapter,” Queequeg and Ishmael are “wedded” together by a whaling rope, an image that Lyons harnesses to illustrate the “bound-togetherness” of US and Oceanian history (2).1 This “bound-togetherness” has received increased attention in the past years as American literary studies has turned to the Pacific, though perhaps not yet with the attention to “Oceanian institutions, perspectives, humor, and ways of knowing (and narrating)” that Lyons calls for (2). Nicholas Thomas, a historical anthropologist of the Pacific whose work explores the complexities of exchange and circulation between the Pacific and Europe in the context of colonialism, might use a slightly different term for a similar idea: entanglement.2 In a sense, this term too conjures Melville’s whale lines connecting Queequeg and Ishmael, and undulating across the Pacific to the United States.3 Moby-Dick is, of course, a famously long book. And the Pacific is a notoriously large oceanic region. And many of the other texts that emerged from early European encounters with the Pacific were, as Michelle Burnham has recently pointed out, both large and long. In her survey of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Pacific travel writing and subsequent discussion of the dynamics of trade and time within narratives of state-sponsored European expeditions in the region, Burnham notes a [End Page 797] temporality of “prolonged promise” that combines “patient duration with impatient expectation” (“Trade Time” 431). “Temporal prolongation is materially evident,” Burnham adds, “in the most obvious feature shared by the vast majority of these travel books: their size. … [T]hey were bulky and heavy; they were wide, tall, and thick; and they typically consisted of multiple volumes” (433). The scale of the region being explored finds a corollary in the size and length of the material texts resulting from that exploration. Moby-Dick and lengthy travel narratives structure our thinking about nineteenth-century US literary encounters with the Pacific, but in what follows I explore US entanglements with the Pacific through a text defined by a radically different scale and narrative pace. The Little, but Affecting History of Mary Howard was published by the Sandbornton Press [sic] in Sanbornton, New Hampshire, in 1836. The sixteen-page chapbook is less than four inches high—a small book for small hands (see fig. 1). It tells of an angelic young girl who lives with her parents in England. When Mary is orphaned she is taken to New Zealand, where she is tattooed by “the son of a New Zealand Chief” before eventually returning to England. Decades before Melville wrote Queequeg into existence, the marked Mary Howard appeared in rural New England. Whereas Burnham reads across a subgenre of Pacific travel narratives to “identify … some of its textual and narratological features” (430), I move outward from one tiny, dense children’s text to show how its entanglement with other genres such as captivity narratives brings the Pacific home to the domestic spaces of New England. It brings the Pacific home in the sense that it puts bodies marked by Pacific encounters into small New Hampshire hands at the same time that it shows how another, distant settler nation emerges in US contexts. In other words, Mary Howard reveals transpacific circulations of bodies and narratives beyond those of sailors, sea captains, and state-sponsored expeditions as it conjures indigenous and female bodies that move around the Pacific. And in doing so it also encourages us to think about how Australasia and the United States are bound together historically as settler spaces colonized during the same historical era. In what follows, I show how...

Chasing Slavery's Ghost

In Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison emphasizes the uncanny influences of slavery on the nation's “racial unconsciousness” (xii). From Harriet Jacobs to William Faulkner to Kara Walker, some of the most celebrated text of US art reflect slavery's horrific scenes. While no one could deny the presence of slavery on the minds of progressive activists, poets, as well as the audience for the mini-series Roots (1977), in the decades prior to Morrison's Playing, US literary scholars all too seldom discussed slavery beyond Frederick Douglas' narrative, even while it was clear to historians and sociologists how much slavery mattered. One could even say that Americanists' failure or reluctance to recognize the centrality of slavery provoked Morrison's assertion that slavery's effects still have yet to be fully grasped. Nor was Morrison alone in making this critique: in an infamous speech at Howard University in 1994, vitriolic black activist Khallid Muhammad remarked about the presence of a Jewish Holocaust museum and the absence of a public memorial recognizing the millions of slaves who died in the Middle Passage. However offensive Muhammad's speech, like the arguments of Morrison and many other scholars and artists, it presents slavery's holocaust as a living present that Americans generally do not want to face. David Marriot puts it another way, observing that the US has failed to mourn slavery, and thus slavery maintains a haunting occult presence, “nowhere but nevertheless everywhere” (xxi).

Embracing Intercultural Diversification: Teaching Young Adult Literature with Native American Themes

Native American and non–Native American students can develop a richer understanding of US literary and cultural history by studying Native American themes.

Racism and Violence in Current US Literary and Cultural Criticism

Racism and Violence in Current US Literary and Cultural Criticism

The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction Jeanie Murphy Haywood Ferreira, Rachel . The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2011. Pp. 304. ISBN 978-0-8195-7082-6. The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction examines early science fiction writing in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Encompassing the time period from approximately 1850 through 1920, this text is an innovative and thoroughly enjoyable exploration of a genre not often associated with Latin American literature. As Haywood Ferreira affirms, early science fiction writing has generally been studied within the context of US and northern European literary production; however, her monograph clearly and cogently demonstrates that original and engaging narratives published in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Latin America can also be appreciated through the lens of science fiction. Haywood Ferreira's study is comprised of four chapters that chronologically and thematically trace the progression of science-fictional texts in the three countries. The works of well-known, canonical writers, such as Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga, Amado Nervo, Martín Luis Guzmán, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, are critically analyzed, as are pieces by less prolific authors. In total, eighteen authors and more than thirty novels and short stories are a part of this extensive investigation of literature informed by both science and what the author refers to as the "pseudosciences." The final listing of science fictional texts published in Latin America between 1775 and 1920 will be extremely helpful to those readers who wish to explore the topic further. Chapter 1, "Displacement in Space and Time: The Latin American Utopia and Dystopia," focuses on futuristic texts that employ the trope of spatial and temporal travel. The literary strategy allows each author to call attention to the social and political issues of his day and to put forth his individual vision of how to promote progress and stability for Latin America. While signaling the influence of writers such as Camille Flammarion, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe on the texts under study, Haywood Ferreira also develops a persuasive argument in which she details the importance of local ideas and circumstances on the works. She is equally successful in challenging the widely held assumption that early Latin American science fiction tends to avoid scientific detail and technological description. The noticeable influence on Latin America's science fiction of Darwin's theory of evolution, Spencer's Social Darwinism and Lamarckian concepts of heredity is the theme of chapter 2. Although these evolutionary theories were frequently questioned in the literary texts, Haywood Ferreira explains the overall role scientific discourse played in the region's literature at the dawn of the twentieth century. For instance, these scientific theories were often modified and incorporated into novels and short stories as a way to further explore the contemporary political [End Page 550] debates centered on the dichotomy of civilization/barbarism. Authors such as Augusto Emilio Zaluar and Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg are examined in this chapter. Concepts from the alternative sciences of Magnetism, Spiritism, and Theosophy are explained and placed within the context of early Latin American science fiction in chapter 3. Asserting that the genre's first wave, particularly in Latin America, often obscured the distinctions between the canonical sciences and more occult practices, Haywood Ferreira's analysis of several stories is a fascinating study of the syncretic nature of many early science fictional narratives. Her study includes, among other texts, "Un fenómeno inexplicable" by Lugones, "Quien escucha, su mal oye" by Gorriti, and "Un viaje celestial" by Pedro Castera. Basing her arguments on the evidence that alternative scientific approaches enjoyed some degree of credibility at the time, as well as the fact that the field's practitioners used ostensibly scientific methods, the author establishes that the texts do fit within the category of science fiction. Chapter 4 examines texts by Holmberg, Alejandro Cuevas, and Horacio Quiroga, in which an artificially created human double is the central theme. The stories reflect the technological advances of the time period and offer a literary assessment of society's acceptance or rejection of the developments. As the author ably demonstrates, these doubles, in the form of automatons and laboratory experiments...

Facial Uplift: Plastic Surgery, Cosmetics and the Retailing of Whiteness in the Work of María Cristina Mena

Heavy promotion for beauty products and services first appeared in North America during the first two decades of the twentieth century. While the vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans had interpreted cosmetic adornment as an indecorous alteration of a woman’s “natural” body, many in the early twentieth century came to embrace not only the rise of a multitude of beauty products such as commercial soaps, skin care treatments and cosmetics, but also dramatic new medical technologies of body modification including cosmetic surgery. It was not an easy shift, however, for people to unequivocally embrace the physical display and physiognomic flexibility that the new cosmetic and surgical technologies of beauty afforded to women of means, some of which were understood to change skin color and the perceived ethnic profile of the nose. Many people were unsettled by the wide availability of products and services that enabled women to alter their bodies, an entity that, since the previous century, an increasing variety of scientific and popular practices had formulated as the most reliable indicator of one’s racial status, moral worth and personal character. In fact, Euro-American intellectuals, activists and cultural workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border increasingly regarded traits such as an aquiline nose or recessed brow as universal indicators of an individual’s racial fitness and individual health, and this ideology of aesthetic determinism undergirded immigration and sterilization policy, public health campaigns and social movements of many kinds 1 Widespread legislation even prohibited individuals with visible disabilities from publicly soliciting money from passersby in the form of the so-called “Ugly Laws.” 2 Yet how could a wide range of early twentieth-century nationalists, reformers and scientists define “beauty” as a fixed sign of racial identity and physical vigor when so many others increasingly accepted the practices of body adornment and modification in the commercial age? How are we to understand the seeming paradox of this aesthetic indeterminism? 3 Writing stories of Mexican women in highbrow US literary magazines such as Century, Cosmopolitan, and American Magazine during the years of the Mexican Revolution, Mexican-American author Maria Cristina Mena (1893-1965) restages these competing ideas about the propriety of cosmetics by turning readers’ attention to the political and economic context of beauty products themselves. Her stories bring beauty to life as a commercial commodity that exposes the fallacy of universal notions of both beauty and race as a priori facts. Illustrating the ways that beauty and its alleged correlative, whiteness, were increasingly mass-produced, transportable products throughout Mexico, her work makes the politically significant point that beauty was available for purchase in the twentieth-century neocolonial marketplace rather than existing outside it as a disinterested, universal ideal. Illuminating the political economy of beauty, Mena interrogated the beauty industry as a potent agent of neocolonialism that negatively impacts her characters’ self-conception, social relations and economic independence at a time when US

Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars (review)

Reviewed by: Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars Nathan Grant Mark Christian Thompson . Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007. x + 232 pp. This book's intriguing premise—that African American thinkers and writers, despite the fact that their drive for civil and human rights always had dignity as its engine, nevertheless embraced fascist ideals at various moments—is perhaps uneasily approached by readers. We usually allow ourselves a venue no farther than the one that finds these thinkers in their frustrations and thus their dark places; we ordinarily drift toward no more distant sensibility than that which suggests that these black thinkers—socialists, Communists, fellow-travelers—when confronted with racism and lynching, were just plain angry. Outrage had to be the order of every day in the 1920s and 1930s, and contemporary readers are prepared to share that with them. As this author contests, however, whether we prepared to share the outrage or not, these writers had ideations that desired more. Thompson's list of "black fascists" includes Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, though at least by the end Wright manages to extricate himself from the list by using philosophy and history to expose fascism's elements in the postwar world via the career of Cross Damon, the protagonist in his 1957 novel The Outsider. With respect to black fascism itself, or even fascism taken more generally, Garvey was always a usual suspect, having taken on, in violent rhetoric, the iconic Haile Selassie even as Mussolini's armies were crossing into Ethopia, and, finally, having had his danse macabre with the Ku Klux Klan. Schuyler's conservatism, even later in life, showed some of the old flashes of the despot-in-waiting in Slaves Today and his later autobiography Black and Conservative. Elsewhere, however, Thompson's text seems hampered by fundamental instabilities. It is hard to see some of the others in quite this vein. Even the fiery McKay—for whom an entire life of racial and class injustice, going back to his days in Jamaica as the observant, reflexive policeman of his book of poetry Constab [End Page 394] Ballad—seemed to be only his portion. Additionally, where black anger over the American occupation of Haiti is concerned, why are James Weldon Johnson's remarks about his writing having triggered the US literary response to it "immodest" (14)? Thompson's omission of Johnson's lengthy four-part series of articles in The Nation in 1920 that caught the attention of at least one US senator, thus marking a stir in Washington, would seem to make easier his notion of a pure intervention of capital that encouraged a blind support of Haiti's authoritarian regime by African Americans. While Thompson is not saying that black intellectuals of the mid twentieth century became, ideologically and irrevocably, jackbooted minions of the Reich, he also does not quite seem to allow for the varieties and vagaries of thought, regardless of race, that could have contributed to the era's rightist absolutism. At least as much as lynching and everyday anti-black discrimination as engines that drove the frustration of African Americans was the generalized feelIng of dread that defined the Depression. The closer the artist was to labor, its struggles, and its deprivation, the easier it became to embrace ever more violent scenarios through which new histories and new mythologies could be imagined. Thompson seems to recognize this when he writes that he sees fascism as "a psychological event that is symptomatically represented in historical-material reality as well as in fantasy and myth. Behind any fascist pageant and work of art, fantasies and myths of power lurk and inform all of their partial representations" (34). One might want then—since the McKay whose "agenda in the 1930s and 1940s for social transformation is radically different from the one he adopted during the early twenties while actively pursuing (all the way to Moscow) the full measure of Communist ideology and activism" (88)—a fuller accounting of the progression toward the firebrand of middle years who wrote the segregationist Harlem: Negro Metropolis, or...

Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven G. Kellman. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, Robert K. Landers. Encounter Books, 2004. The Lives of Agnes Smedley, Ruth Price. Oxford University Press, 2005. Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad. Knopf, 2007. In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is “compulsive.”1 The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.

Page 2: The Big Dialogue

Page 2 American Book Review American Book Review Founded 1977 by Ronald Sukenick Published at the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Houston–Victoria American Book Review specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women’s presses. ABR as a literary journal aims to project the sense of engagement that writers themselves feel about what is being published. It is edited and produced by writers for writers and the general public. Comment on its reviews is encouraged, as are suggestions for future reviews. Send all editorial correspondence or review copies to: American Book Review, University of Houston–Victoria, School of Arts and Sciences, 3007 N. Ben Wilson, Victoria, TX 77901-5731 Telephone: (361) 570-4101 Fax: (361) 580-5501 Email: americanbookreview@uhv.edu Send all subscription correspondence to: American Book Review, University of Houston–Victoria, 3007 N. Ben Wilson, Victoria, TX 77901-5731 Telephone: (361) 570-4101 Email: americanbookreview@uhv.edu© 2008 by American Book Review ISSN 0149-9408. Covers and cover details used by permission. American Book Review appears bimonthly.Annual subscription rates are $24 for a one-year and $40 for a two-year individual subscription; $30 for a one-year institutional subscription; $35 for a one-year foreign, airmail subscription. American Book Review is published by its editors, and is made possible, in part, by generous support from the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Houston–Victoria and Friends of ABR. This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art. ABR is also a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Trade distribution by Hudson–RPM, 150 Black River Road, Worcester, MA 01607; and Armadillo, 7310 LaCienaga Blvd., Inglewood, CA 90302. Indexed in Humanities International Complete, Book Review Index, Current Contents/Arts & Humanities, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. http://americanbookreview.org Publisher: Editor: Managing Editor: Assistant Editor: Layout: Advertising Manager: Subscription Manager: Cover Image: Focus Editor: Publisher Emeritus: Associate Editors: Contributing Editors: Assistants: Jeffrey R. Di Leo Jeffrey R. Di Leo Charles Alcorn David C. Felts David C. Felts Susie Albert Susie Albert© istockphoto.com/The Brainstorm Lab,“Southern Town” Tom Williams Charles B. Harris Mark Amerika, R.M. Berry, C. S. Giscombe, Larry McCaffery, Doug Nufer, Lance Olsen, Kevin Prufer, John Tytell, Barry Wallenstein, Tom Williams, Eric Miles Williamson Rudolfo Anaya, Ron Arias, John Ashbery, Michael Bérubé, Rosellen Brown, Andrei Codrescu, William Demby, Rikki Ducornet, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Russell Hoover, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Michael McClure, Joyce Carol Oates, Marjorie Perloff, Robert Peters, Corinne Robins, Charles Russell, Paul Schiavo, Barry Seiler, Charles Simic, Bruce Sterling, Regina Weinreich Nathan King Page 2 Last month, comments by Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize committee, set off an international discussion about the place of America and its writers in contemporary literature. “There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world,” said Engdahl, “not the United States.” “The US is too isolated, too insular,” he added. Moveover, American writers and publishers “don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” Concludes Engdahl, “That ignorance is restraining.” Engdahl’s comments antagonized writers and publishers in the US. They also served notice to American writers that they should not raise their hopes for receiving a Nobel Prize in literature any time soon. In spite of prodigious US literary production—an estimated 50,000 works of fiction were published just last year in the US—it has been fifteen years since an American author has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Not a bad record, actually, when one considers that in the last fifty years only six Americans were awarded the prize (four of which were born outside of the US). In fact, in the over-one-hundred-year history of the award, only eleven Americans have won (the same number as recipients from the UK, though four fewer than the French). Of our earliest recipients, Sinclair Lewis...

Reading Back, Looking Forward: A Retrospective Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston's first book The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, more than three decades ago. Since then, she has published a second memoir, China Men (1980); a collection of essays on Hawai'i, Hawai'i One Summer (1987); a novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989); a book of and about poetry, To Be the Poet (2002); and a mixed-genre volume, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003). She has also recently edited a volume of writings by war veterans, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006). Kingston's oeuvre covers a range of genres coming out of a powerful literary imagination. At the same time, the psychic and spiritual sources of her writing are evident in her responses to the questions raised in this interview which followed her February 22, 2006 reading at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The interview is framed to cover the thirty years of Kingston's production, rather like the way exhibitions of paintings by visual artists are structured frequently in a retrospective chronology to follow the growth and development of the artist's mind and art. In organizing a retrospective exhibition, the curator is offering the spectator not merely one or some of the artist's paintings in isolation but a valuable sweeping vision of the major works, so as to clarify, even to insert, an understanding of the genius not otherwise apprehensible. The bringing together of an individual artist's separate works and achievements paradoxically also permits the reader a view of the author as a writer treading the years between the texts. A retrospective frame may illuminate the historicity that solidifies an artist's seemingly arbitrary series of works. In setting the individual works in relationship to each other and to those works appearing earlier and later, I hope to suggest the larger patterns, motifs, and linguistic and stylistic characteristics that bind the individual works to an authorial totality (no matter how discontinuous, fluid, and tentative that single authorial identity may be). This retrospective interview may, then, lead to interpretations enriched by layers of primary and secondary readings, each and all held in the suspension of decades of production and reception. Shirley Lim: When The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, you were about thirty-five or thirty-six years old. It brought you tremendous recognition, not only from Asian American readers but also from a mainstream US literary and cultural intelligentsia. How did such immediate and widespread success affect you and your writing, if at all? Maxine Hong Kingston: Well, publishing big when you are thirty-five years old doesn't really change your life that much. If I had been younger if I were in my twenties--I might have gotten really excited and wild and let it all go to my head. At thirty-five, I'm settled. I'm living the life that I want, and so emotionally, psychologically, it did not change me at all. But for the practicalities of the writer's life, it made a difference in that I did not have to do any other work for money. What happened was that I was teaching at a boarding school in Honolulu and it meant I was on duty twenty-four hours a day. You're always on call at a boarding school. I had been teaching there exactly six years during which time I wrote The Woman Warrior. When it was published and I got an advance, it just so happened that I was there for six years so I got a sabbatical. I had made up my mind that during the sabbatical I would write the next book. The conditions of the sabbatical are you have to come back to teach for an additional two years. I got my advance for The Woman Warrior and paid off my sabbatical, so I did not have to come back, and I quit teaching. At that time I got a $5000 advance, enough to pay for one year's salary of my teaching. I thought of it as buying my freedom and then I could write without doing any other [work], no more moonlighting, I could concentrate on writing. …

"Are We There Yet?": Archives, History, and Specificity in African-American Literary Studies

Some 30 years after being initiated by the Black Power and Black Studies movements, African-American literary studies is a thriving field that has come to full maturity. The field, however, offers us a methodological paradox: while many of its practitioners focus on “excavating” African-American literary archives, particularly from the earlier periods, others simultaneously deconstruct the concepts of racial particularity—including notions of “blackness”—without which the search for the archives might not have begun. Methodologically, the field encompasses reprinting and reinterpreting long out-of-print and forgotten texts, in combination with textual and contextual analyses that recover the instability and contingency of racial discourses across space and time. Both these impulses spring from, even as they have transformed, US literary nationalism, by exploring, even as they contest, the contingencies and myth-making of US literatures. When I invoke the field's archives, I mean to move beyond the 1970s and 1980s additive process of canon building with which most of us today would associate the pioneering (and interpretive) work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Robert Stepto, or William Andrews. Today's efforts to identify African American-written texts of different genres run in many directions at once; one direction looks back for continuities, to be sure, between texts from the prehistory of African-American literature (portrayed by some as the not-quite-Jurassic, pre-Harlem Renaissance age), to those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This thread follows a more or less genealogical impulse to identify and locate a so-called African-American “tradition” that coheres around certain genre and ideological continuities and that often links texts sharing a counter-hegemonic status; a status in which the subalternity of African-descended peoples is evoked, resisted, or appropriated. In this search, locating, reprinting, and reinterpreting texts written by African Americans, who held a tenuous and precarious status in US print cultures, makes visible the contributions that African Americans made, not only to US cultural production in general, but also specifically to the production of knowledge in the US academy. We could say we see this transformative potential in the current popularity of black abolitionists' writings—like those of Frederick Douglass—in literature courses and departments.

Gendered Nationalism in Xicotencatl

In 1826, William Stavely Publishing House of Philadelphia first published what is now a little discussed anonymous historical novel in Spanish entitled Jicotencal. Long familiar to mainstream Americanist scholarship as a center of Anglo-American revolutionary history, Philadelphia, in early nineteenth century, was also a hotbed for liberal political ideologies, one of which promoted complete political separation between Spain and its territories in Americas. As such, novel emerged as one of many endorsing not only political independence, but also a cultural distance between Americas and Europe. The liberal political charge of text explains author's decision to publish piece anonymously since Fernando VII of Spain often proclaimed death sentences in absentia for political dissidents of Spanish territories. Fernando VII issued one such death sentence for Felix Varela, a Cuban priest, philosopher, and political liberal, who fled to United States, where, well-known literary critics Luis Leal and Rodolfo J. Cortina have persuasively argued, he wrote Jicotencal: first hispanophone historical novel written in United States, or in Americas. (1) Despite these claims for primacy, which leading nineteenth-century scholars have corroborated, text was only recently recovered in Spanish form by Recovering U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series in 1995; and Jicotencal was not translated English until Guillermo I. Castillo-Feliu published his translation in 1999 as Xicotencatl. (2) Despite recent English access to text, English language scholars have given little academic attention to novel because Americanists continue to largely ignore non-English writings and Latino/a cultural forms; ethnic Americanists persist in focusing mainly on twentieth-century literary forms; and US Latin Americanists continue to ignore issue of hispanophone US literary production. (3) Moreover, handful of Latin Americanists who have critically examined text have focused on debating authorship of text to extent that they have largely ignored its issues of post-coloniality and gender. Most scholars, therefore, have only peripherally examined how text represses while dismissing female as a participant and constructor of that history. Moctezuma, as primary power in pre-colonial Mexico, resisted Spanish colonial enterprise while second most powerful nation in pre-colonial Mexico, Tlaxcala, became Spaniard's greatest ally. In 1821, three hundred years after Cortes conquered Aztecs, and eleven years after Mexico achieved independence from Spain, Agustin de Iturbide I became emperor of new nation and fashioned a royal court in Spanish tradition after disbanding Mexican national congress. As such, Xicotencatl revisits and aestheticizes moment of colonial conquest a series of and political lessons for novel's contemporary readership. The text oppositionally represents historical trajectory of fall of Aztec empire and dramatizes classical a partisan glorification of Amerindian past in order to summon social conscience of novel's contemporary period against reinstating a European monarchy in post-independence Mexico. Georg Lukacs argues that modern writers of historical novels such as Xicotencatl take from historiography and historical philosophy of their time not only facts, but theory that these facts may be freely and arbitrarily interpreted [...] and therefore that it is necessary to 'introject' one's own subjective problems 'amorphousness' of history (244). As such, he rightly identifies this manner of fictionalizing as the decline of bourgeois realism, in which historical novel develops social critical novel because author's moral subjectivism interprets historical past into a moralizing fable intended to dramatize superiority of virtue over vice (78-80). …