WesScholar

Follow

• 

  All We Know: Three Lives

  Lisa Cohen

  Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement. The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate friendships with the legendary actresses and dancers of the twentieth century. Her ephemeral legacy lies in the thousands of objects she collected to preserve the memory of those performers and to honor the feelings they inspired. An icon of haute couture and a fashion editor of British Vogue, Madge Garland held bracing views on dress that drew on her feminism, her ideas about modernity, and her love of women. Existing both vividly and invisibly at the center of cultural life, she—like Murphy and de Acosta—is now almost completely forgotten. In All We Know, Lisa Cohen describes these women’s glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. At once a series of intimate portraits and a startling investigation into style, celebrity, sexuality, and the genre of biography itself, All We Know explores a hidden history of modernism and pays tribute to three compelling lives.

• 

  The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962-2007

  Sally Bachner

  In The Prestige of Violence Sally Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented.

  Bachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable, on the other. Genocide, terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape, and murder are major themes, yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable. Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation. Instead, she argues, both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violence.

  Examining such works as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Bachner locates the postwar prestige of violence in the disjunction between the privileged security of wealthier Americans and the violence perpetrated by the United States abroad. The literary investment in unspeakable and often immaterial violence emerges in Bachner’s readings as a complex and ideologically varied literary solution to the political geography of violence in our time.

• 

  Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage

  Natasha Korda

  Korda's study is a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. She reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities. The book combines archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays.

• 

  Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

  Deb Olin Unferth

  Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.

  Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.

• 

  Address

  Elizabeth Willis

  Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees--beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis's poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: "so begins our legislation."

• 

  The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud

  Joel Pfister

  Honored in his own time as one of the most prominent Indian public intellectuals, Henry Roe Cloud (c. 1884–1950) fought to open higher education to Indians. Joel Pfister’s extensive archival research establishes the historical significance of key chapters in the Winnebago’s remarkable life. Roe Cloud was the first Indian to receive undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale University, where he was elected to the prestigious and intellectual Elihu Club. Pfister compares Roe Cloud’s experience to that of other “college Indians” and also to African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Roe Cloud helped launch the Society of American Indians, graduated from Auburn seminary, founded a preparatory school for Indians, and served as the first Indian superintendent of the Haskell Institute (forerunner of Haskell Indian Nations University). He also worked under John Collier at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he was a catalyst for the Indian New Deal.

• 

  No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater

  Richard Slotkin

  In this richly researched and dramatic work of military history, eminent historian Richard Slotkin recounts one of the Civil War’s most pivotal events: the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864. At first glance, the Union’s plan seemed brilliant: A regiment of miners would burrow beneath a Confederate fort, pack the tunnel with explosives, and blow a hole in the enemy lines. Then a specially trained division of African American infantry would spearhead a powerful assault to exploit the breach created by the explosion. Thus, in one decisive action, the Union would marshal its mastery of technology and resources, as well as demonstrate the superior morale generated by the Army of the Potomac’s embrace of emancipation. At stake was the chance to drive General Robert E. Lee’s Army of North Virginia away from the defense of the Confederate capital of Richmond–and end the war.

• 

  A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government

  Sean McCann

  There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the rise of presidential authority.

  Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work.

• 

  Vacation

  Deb Olin Unferth

  A man follows his wife. The wife follows a stranger. The stranger leaves town and the man goes after him, determined to settle the score. But the man is not the only one looking for the stranger, and the stranger has troubles of his own. Amid all this, the earth quakes, a boy leaps out a window, and a dolphin swims free. Of course people have adventures of this kind—of course! of course!—but we’ve never heard of it before. With deadpan humor and skewed wordplay, Deb Olin Unferth weaves a mystery of hope and heartbreak.

• 

  Critique for What?: Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies

  Joel Pfister

  Critique for what? Fortunately, some of the most provocative self-critical intellectuals, from the postwar period to the postmodern present, have wrestled with this question. Joel Pfister criss-crosses the Atlantic to take stock of exciting British cultural studies, American studies, and Left studies that challenge the academic critique-for-critique's-sake and career's-sake business and ask: critique for what and for whom? historicizing for what and for whom? politicizing for what and for whom? America for what and for whom?Pfister's historical research convenes New Left revisionary socialists, members of the unpartied Left, cultural studies theorists, American studies scholars, radical historians, progressive literary critics, and early proponents of transnational analysis in what amounts to a lively book-length strategy seminar. British political intellectuals, featuring Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Raphael Samuel, and Americans, including F. O. Matthiessen, Robert Lynd, C. Wright Mills, and Richard Ohmann, help readers reconsider what links the critical project to social transformation, activism, and organizing. Eager to prevent cultural studies from lapsing into cynicism studies, this book thinks creatively about the possibilities of using as well as developing critique in our new millennium.

• 

  Minor Robberies

  Deb Olin Unferth

  In the grand tradition of Neapolitan ice cream, ZZ Top, and Cerberus, the tri-headed guardian of Hades, this set combines individual, short fiction collections by three talented practitioners of the short-short form. Manguso’s Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape is a series of crystalline recollections of her childhood misadventures; Eggers’ How the Water Feels to the Fishes brings a deadpan absurdism to the intimacy and vision of his earlier work; and Unferth’s rollicking Minor Robberies unleashes a horde of off-kilter characters and their indelible misadventures. Each author’s work comes in its own hardcover, foil-stamped volume, and the three volumes are housed in an elegant slipcase.

• 

  Meteoric Flowers

  Elizabeth Willis

  Elizabeth Willis's new collection is a stunning collision of the pastoral tradition with the politics of the post-industrial age. These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

• 

  Deep Gossip

  Henry Abelove

  Henry Abelove, literary critic, astute historian, and pioneer in queer studies, offers interdisciplinary views on the connections between politics, culture, and sexuality. Deep Gossip addresses the willful misreading of Freud's views on homosexuality among American psychoanalysts; reconsiders sexual practice during England's eighteenth century; assesses the contemporary relevance of Thoreau's Walden, particularly to queer politics; and traces the emergence of a queer critique of previous approaches to lesbian and gay history. Abelove uncovers the origins of American studies as a scholarly discipline and evaluates the impact of literature - specifically the same-sex eroticism found in works by such writers as James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Bowles, and Ned Rorem - on the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. The essays gathered in Deep Gossip confirm Henry Abelove's reputation as one of America's leading thinkers on the cultural politics of sexuality.

• 

  Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England

  Ruth Nisse

  Defining Acts considers how the surviving English plays of the fifteenth century and transform competing late-medieval practices of interpretation. These works take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts--men or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jews--and stage these texts for audiences far beyond their original academic contexts. Ruth Nisse focuses in particular on how theater translates the temporal ideas of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama both in its vernacular literary setting, as a genre composed against the same cultural background as "The Canterbury Tales" and "Piers Plowman," and in its performances, which negotiate a range of current social and political issues. Defining Acts begins with an introductory chapter that reveals the dangers and pleasures of theatrical representation in a reading of Chaucer's antic "Miller's Tales" and the violently anti-theatrical Wycliffite "Treatise of Miracle Playing." Subsequent chapters engage problems such as the clash between civic rule and the authority of women's visionary experiences in the York Plays; competing ideas of labor and poverty in the Towneley Plays; and theories of Jewish exegesis that continue to haunt Christian and national understandings of history in the "Croxton Play of the Sacrament." By reading medieval drama in relation to its intertexts, Nisse explores the ways in which ideas previously limited to academic discourse become elements of public theatrical performances, available to new audiences. Her pathbreaking approach to the study of medieval drama makes this book required reading for scholars and students alike.

• 

  Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality

  Richard Slotkin

  Constructed as a military history of two American army regiments of World War I, Slotkin's narrative functions as an inquiry into the soldiers'racial and ethnic backgrounds. Both units were raised in New York City: one consisted of black soldiers, the other of recent immigrants. That description only begins the contextual social spectrum Slotkin covers in arguing his thesis: that white racial conceptions of Americanism after the war thwarted the expectations of blacks and Jews. Slotkin defines those hopes as a "social bargain" implicit in the support given to black recruitment by leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois: if we enlist, then after victory, you will abolish Jim Crow. The bargain's fate unfolds as Slotkin recounts the racial relations with the two regiments (often relating tension between named individuals) in the course of training and ferocious combat in France. The bargain's unraveling in the race riots of 1919, followed by the melancholy fates of some returning veterans, concludes Slotkin's scholarly analytic history.

• 

  Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874

  Stephanie Weiner

  Through the examination of a range of canonical and non-canonical authors--including Blake, Shelley, Cooper, Linton, Landor, Meredith, Thomson and Swinburne--Kuduk Weiner connects the formal strategies of republican poems to the political theory and expressive cultures of republican radicalism.

• 

  Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern

  Joel Pfister

  Spanning the 1870s to the present, Individuality Incorporated demonstrates how crucial a knowledge of Native American-White history is to rethinking key issues in American studies, cultural studies, and the history of subjectivity. Joel Pfister proposes an ingenious critical and historical reinterpretation of constructions of “Indians” and “individuals.” Native Americans have long contemplated the irony that the government used its schools to coerce children from diverse tribes to view themselves first as “Indians”—encoded as the evolutionary problem—and then as “individuals”—defined as the civilized industrial solution. As Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, and Black Elk attest, tribal cultures had their own complex ways of imagining, enhancing, motivating, and performing the self that did not conform to federal blueprints labeled “individuality.” Enlarging the scope of this history of “individuality,” Pfister elaborates the implications of state, corporate, and aesthetic experiments that moved beyond the tactics of an older melting pot hegemony to impose a modern protomulticultural rule on Natives. The argument focuses on the famous Carlisle Indian School; assimilationist novels; Native literature and cultural critique from Zitkala-Sa to Leslie Marmon Silko; Taos and Santa Fe bohemians (Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Austin); multicultural modernisms (Fred Kabotie, Oliver La Farge, John Sloan, D’Arcy McNickle); the Southwestern tourism industry’s development of corporate multiculturalism; the diversity management schemes that John Collier implemented as head of the Indian New Deal; and early formulations of ethnic studies. Pfister’s unique analysis moves from Gilded Age incorporations of individuality to postmodern incorporations of multicultural reworkings of individuality to unpack what is at stake in producing subjectivity in World America.

• 

  Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture

  Richard Ohmann

  Richard Ohmann's work is in a class by itself. While editor of College English, and in the three books he published since then, he has created America's most comprehensive vision of how teaching and scholarship are at once part of the university, of society and of history. In Politics of Knowledge, Ohmann's essays and interviews analyze, explain and criticize the roles of the university, the academic professions and publishing in a rearranged America. Focusing on the opposed movements of a more open university and overwhelmingly powerful multinational corporations, he offers language and formulations that will help present generations move closer to the hope that teaching and scholarly work can enhance the lives of all. This scholar, teacher and activist sets his often anecdotal and autobiographical reflections within the broad tapestry of historical, economic and material conditions. It is this combination of the long backward-looking personal perspective and adept critical analysis that have made his work a resource for professors and students alike.

• 

  Turneresque

  Elizabeth Willis

  The title plays off the style of J. M. W. Turner’s paintings and media mogul Ted Turner’s revival of B-cinema as two competing versions of the sublime. Like Turner’s painting, the book embraces both figuration and abstraction. It can be read as repeated acts of “turning” — between visuality and sound, lyric and narrative tension, the sheen of popular icons and the shadow of literary obscurity, the celebrated and the invisible worlds. Each of the three anchoring sections of prose poems engages in a dialogue with aspects of visual composition: with Turner and other artists, with film, or with the “moving picture” of American culture as framed by the car window. The lyric sections are composed as counterpoint.

• 

  Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England

  Natasha Korda

  Shakespeare's Domestic Economies explores representations of female subjectivity in Shakespearean drama from a refreshingly new perspective, situating The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, and Measure for Measure in relation to early modern England's nascent consumer culture and competing conceptions of property. Drawing evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, marriage sermons, household inventories, and wills to explore the realities and dramatic representations of women's domestic roles, Natasha Korda departs from traditional accounts of the commodification of women, which maintain that throughout history women have been "trafficked" as passive objects of exchange between men. In the early modern period, Korda demonstrates, as newly available market goods began to infiltrate households at every level of society, women emerged as never before as the "keepers" of household properties. With the rise of consumer culture, she contends, the housewife's managerial function assumed a new form, becoming increasingly centered around caring for the objects of everyday life—objects she was charged with keeping as if they were her own, in spite of the legal strictures governing women's property rights. Korda deftly shows how their positions in a complex and changing social formation allowed women to exert considerable control within the household domain, and in some areas to thwart the rule of fathers and husbands.

• 

  Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism

  Sean McCann

  In Gumshoe America Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a homogenized society. Gumshoe America traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crime fiction from the1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum on the KKK in the pulp magazine Black Mask to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genre’s conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time.

  Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett’s career, McCann shows how Hammett’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler’s fiction, unlike Hammett’s, idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback—Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford—are examined next in juxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the growing vision of America as a meritocracy.

• 

  Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction

  Ashraf Rushdy

  Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post@-civil rights era.

  Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy situates these works in their cultural moment of production, highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family. Tracing the evolution of this literary form, he considers such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors.

  Remembering Generations examines how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility--of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society.

• 

  Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln

  Richard Slotkin

  In a brilliant work of historical imagination, Abe immerses the reader in the isolating poverty and difficult circumstances that shaped Abraham Lincoln's character. Marked by his mother's horrible death and the struggle to keep reading and learning in the face of his father's fierce disapproval, Abe persevered, growing into the complicated and empathetic man who changed the course of American history. Slotkin's Abe comes of age during a dramatic flatboat journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Along the way, Abe and his companions see slavery firsthand and experience the violence-and the pleasures-of frontier settlements and the cities of Natchez and New Orleans. Numerous historical characters make appearances alongside the colorful denizens of the Mississippi: preachers and vigilantes, planters and thieves, prostitutes and lady reformers. Transformed by what he has seen and done, Abe returns to make his final break with his father and to step out of the wilderness into New Salem-and history.

• 

  Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of Literary Form

  Ashraf Rushdy

  NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.

• 

  The Year of Reading Proust

  Phyllis Rose

  A brilliant and original memoir of midlife-a writing life, a reading life, a woman's life-by the distinguished author of Parallel Lives

  Phyllis Rose, a biographer, essayist, and literary critic, finally got around to reading Proust in middle age. As Rose learned, you don't have to live through an unhappy childhood or celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. You just need patience, candor, and a close-to-scientific passion for truth. She begins to learn how to navigate the intricacies of Proust's novels, at the same time reflecting on the course of her own life.

  With striking honesty, Rose writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and her own mortality. As she moves from daily experience to what she's read and back again, she illuminates how the close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us and how such a subtle celebration of books can help us live.

• 

  Skin Trade

  Ann duCille

  How does the notion of colorblind equality fit with the social and economic realities of black Americans? Challenging the increasingly popular argument that blacks should settle down, stop whining, and get jobs, Skin Trade insists that racism remains America's premier national story and its grossest national product. From Aunt Jemima Pancakes to ethnic Barbie dolls, corporate America peddles racial and gender stereotypes, packaging and selling them to us as breakfast food or toys for our kids.

  Moving from the realm of child's play through the academy and the justice system, Ann duCille draws on icons of popular culture to demonstrate that it isn't just race and gender that matter in America but race and gender as reducible to skin color, body structure, and other visible signs of difference. She reveals that Mattel, Inc., uses stereotypes of gender, race, and cultural difference to mark--and market--its Barbie dolls as female, white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. The popularity of these dolls suggests the degree to which we have internalized dominant definitions of self and other.

• 

  Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century

  Richard Ohmann

  At the turn of the nineteenth century, American capitalism was in crisis, producing too many goods for too few buyers, that crisis was ultimately resolved in a novel, historically decisive manner by creating whole new categories of consumer goods and by appealing to new groups of people who might purchase them. What we now recognise as consumer society originated in that period, and it was mass culture, the first 'culture industry', that helped bring it into being. In a magisterial study of the process, Richard Ohmann surveys the new practices of advertising, mass distribution of goods, and, most important, the birth of the inexpensive mass-audience magazine to analyse the creation of the American professional-managerial class. Drawing upon work in economic, cultural, and social history, he integrates the seemingly disparate phenomena of modern middle-class life in a coherent tale of how the class was formed and came to occupy the foreground in the malign ideological formation, 'the American Dream.' Elegantly written, lucidly argued, and brimming with arresting facts and incidents, Selling Culture offers the definitive account of the relation between culture and economy in the transformation of the United States into a mass-consumption, mass-mediated society.

• 

  Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

  Joel Pfister

  Until now, Eugene O'Neill's psychological dramas have been analyzed mainly by critics who relied on obvious parallels between O'Neill's life, his family, and his plays. In this theoretically expansive and interdisciplinary book, Joel Pfister reassesses what was at stake ideologically in O'Neill's staging and modernizing of 'psychological' individualism for his social class.

• 

  The Human Abstract

  Elizabeth Willis

  Unwilling to share her "secret form of symmetry," Willis fills this work with hermetic detritus. Flashes of imagination deflect from image to image through word sequences that attempt to evade mundane sequences of language. Like a hierophant out of H.D.'s later work, Willis teases the mind more than she stirs the heart. There's a city without a border, a river in flames, a black iris, the "eye of God," Forest A., "crypted messages," a rosy dime, people like Azrael, a peregrine Prince, Plydictes, Qeys, Xian, and a good deal of pacing up and down to "measure...an outline of significance," which results in lines like "Zero-gardening to the lees/hard-labor defunct/when I against you tether/milktooth surrogate carnivore/though lovers in truth/God never was my darling." Omission passes for revelation: the chore of the reader is to hike out of Forest A. Sensation is suspect in this land of the occult, which is exhilarating but abstruse. Only the most dedicated poetry enthusiast will volunteer to accompany Willis on her journey to inaccessible, rarified meaning.
  
  Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute

• 

  Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

  William W. Stowe

  Hardcover, Princeton University Press 1994 English 272 pages

  ISBN: 0691033641 ISBN-13: 9780691033648

  In a nation struggling to establish its own identity, all kinds of Americans, for all kinds of reasons, were enchanted with Europe. A European trip, whether extravagant or modest, could serve social advancement, aesthetic enrichment, or personal curiosity. Travel allowed men and women, the descendants of European settlers or African slaves, to shed their familiar surroundings and comfortable personas, adopt new roles, and measure themselves against the European experience. These travellers were often also writers. Throughout the 19th century, celebrated authors and beginners alike published newspaper columns, magazine articles, guidebooks, travel essays, letters, and novels based on their European journeys. In this work the author examines not only classic works by such writers as Irving, Fuller, Twain, James, and Adams, but also lesser-known works by African-American authors, journalists, feminist writers, and diarists. Travel and the writing of it were important, Stowe argues, in moulding a peculiarly democratic, yet essentially class-based, sense of personal and group identity. Combining literary and cultural analysis, he suggests new ways of understanding 19th-century Americans' concept of their nation and its place in the world.

• 

  The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction

  Ann duCille

  What does the tradition of marriage mean for people who have historically been deprived of its legal status? Generally thought of as a convention of the white middle class, the marriage plot has received little attention from critics of African-American literature. In this study, Ann duCille uses texts such as Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to demonstrate that the African-American novel, like its European and Anglo-American counterparts, has developed around the marriage plot--what she calls "the coupling convention." Exploring the relationship between racial ideology and literary and social conventions, duCille uses the coupling convention to trace the historical development of the African-American women's novel. She demonstrates the ways in which black women appropriated this novelistic device as a means of expressing and reclaiming their own identity. More than just a study of the marriage tradition in black women's fiction, however, The Coupling Convention takes up and takes on many different meanings of tradition. It challenges the notion of a single black literary tradition, or of a single black feminist literary canon grounded in specifically black female language and experience, as it explores the ways in which white and black, male and female, mainstream and marginalized "traditions" and canons have influenced and cross-fertilized each other. Much more than a period study, The Coupling Convention spans the period from 1853 to 1948, addressing the vital questions of gender, subjectivity, race, and the canon that inform literary study today. In this original work, duCille offers a new paradigm for reading black women's fiction.

• 

  The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists

  Henry Abelove

  "My theme is seduction, resistance, and the cultural consequences of both," says the author (history, Wesleyan Univ.) in the preface to this eminently readable account of Methodist social history. His particular thrust is to detail John Wesley's immediate and cumulative influence on his Methodist followers and to show what it meant in both personal and sociohistorical terms. To devote more space to chronicling the fascinating effect of Wesley on his flock, Abelove presupposes a working knowledge of Methodist history. But though the book is academic in tone, its pace and scope never fail to engage. Highly recommended for seminary and religion collections. (Pictures not seen). - Sandra Collins, Trinity Sch. for Ministry, Ambridge, Pa.

• 

  The Hottest Water in Chicago: On Family, Race, Time, and American Culture

  Gayle Pemberton

  This is a book of essays on art and literature that also provide revealing glimpses into the life and family of one black baby boomer. They are as interesting as anything Maya Angelou has written but present a whole different experience. Pemberton came from a middle-class background, with an intact and loving family. Her father was an Urban League official, and the family moved several times: she lived in Chicago, Kansas, Missouri, and Minnesota; visited grandparents in California while growing up; and she was an exchange student in England for a year. In addition to her interesting essays, readers could expand their horizons by reading the sources of her quotes, which is easily done, as she provides a bibliography for each essay. Highly recommended for all public libraries. - Anita L. Cole, Miami-Dade P.L. System, Fla.

• 

  The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton

  Ashraf Rushdy

  The Empty Garden draws a portrait of Milton as a cultural and religious critic who, in his latest and greatest poems, wrote narratives that illustrate the proper relationships among the individual, the community, and God. Rushdy argues that the political theory implicit in these relationships arises from Milton’s own drive for self-knowledge, a kind of knowledge that gives the individual freedom to act in accordance with his or her own understanding of God’s will rather than the state’s. Rushdy redefines Milton’s creative spirit in a way that encompasses his poetic, political, and religious careers.

• 

  Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

  Richard Slotkin

  The myth of the Western frontier--which assumes that whites' conquest of Native Americans and the taming of the wilderness were preordained means to a progressive, civilized society--is embedded in our national psyche. U.S. troops called Vietnam "Indian country." President John Kennedy invoked "New Frontier" symbolism to seek support for counterinsurgency abroad. In an absorbing, valuable, scholarly study, Slotkin, director of American studies at Wesleyan University, traces the pervasiveness of frontier mythology in American consciousness from 1890 to the present. Theodore Roosevelt's "progressive" version of the frontier myth was used to justify conquest of the Philippines and the emergence of a new managerial class. Dime novels and detective stories adapted the myth to portray gallant heroes repressing strikers, immigrants and dissidents. Completing a trilogy begun with Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment , Slotkin unmasks frontier mythmaking in novels and Hollywood movies. The myth's emphasis on use of force over social solutions has had a destructive impact, he shows, on our handling of urban violence, racial conflict and the "drug war."

• 

  Second Law

  Elizabeth Willis

  "The poems in SECOND LAW are terse, precise, ecstatic and luminous. White letters serve as lures and traces through gaps of ordered scientific discourse the rapture of the poet's will remains captive and rejoicing. In these linked fragmentary linguistic structures Elizabeth Willis enters Bunyan's emblematic river another time; singing" —Susan Howe.

• 

  The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question"

  Christina Crosby

  The Victorians' passion for history was equalled perhaps only by their fascination with "woman", manifested as a ceaseless posing of "the woman question". In this book Christina Crosby argues that each of these obsessions entails the other, that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history necessitated the placing of "woman" as an entity before, beyond, above or below history. In a discussion of key Victorian novels and non-literary texts, Crosby demonstrates the intermeshing of "history" and "the woman question". Her investigations range from philosophy and the philosophical novel - "Daniel Deronda" and Hegel's "Philosophy of History" - to the historical novel and the writing of history "proper" - "Henry Esmond" and Macauley's "History of England", from melodrama and social studies - Wilkie Collins' "The Frozen Deep", "Little Dorrit" and Henry Mayhew's "History of the People" to theology, aesthetics and autobiographical fiction - "Villette" , Patrick Fairbairn's "The Typology of Scripture" and Ruskin's "Modern Painters". This book should be of interest to students and teachers of English literature, social history and women's studies.

• 

  The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction

  Joel Pfister

  This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's psychological themes, the author draws on the history of personal life to suggest that mid-century psychological fictions help, historically, to account for the surfacing of a bourgeois Freudian discourse later in the century. The production of Personal Life also asks why it was that women in mid-century fiction, especially that written by men, were represented as psychological targets of male monomaniacs in the home. By connecting the enforcement of middle-class 'feminine' roles to psychological tension between the sexes, Hawthorne's fiction at times implicitly critiques the sentimental construction of gender roles on which the economic and cultural ascendancy of his class relied.

• 

  Never Say Goodbye: Essays

  Phyllis Rose

  Judicious selection and graceful arrangement mark this slim collection of essays, allowing Rose ( Jazz Cleopatra ) full range of voice. Considering the seductions of shopping (the volume is named after a favorite secondhand store) or the moral value of a college education, Rose, who teaches literature at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, offers idiosyncratic, authoritative ruminations that, while sometimes generalizing from specifics, never overreach. Firmly grounded in details--from the description of a restaurant meal in "Of Shared Memories," readers could recognize the writer's mother on the street or in a conversation--and devoid of sentimentality and facile irony, the previously published essays (many from the New York Times "Hers" column) are grouped by setting: New York, France and New England. Passionate, witty and generous, Rose's observations reveal a writer of warmth and conviction.

• 

  Literary Revision: The Inexact Science of Getting It Right

  Joseph Reed

  Catalogue of exhibition held at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University between October and December 1990.

• 

  American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre

  Joseph Reed

• 

  Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time

  Phyllis Rose

  Josephine Baker's fascinating life encompassed stardom in the Paris of the 1920s, a career in the French Resistance, and civil rights activism in the '50s and '60s. Rose brings Baker to life as a performer, as a cultural icon, and as a black woman in a white world.

• 

  The Return of Henry Starr

  Richard Slotkin

  Our mythologizing of the Old West is the theme of this epic novel about an Oklahoma outlaw who eventually immortalizes his own career in the silent movies. The eponymous hero Henry Starr, half-Cherokee nephew of Belle Starr and grandson of one of the last great Indian leaders, nourishes his imagination on dime novels celebrating the exploits of historic desperados like Jesse James and on tales of the golden age of the Cherokee nation and its defiance of the white man. But, coming of age at the turn-of-the-century, he sees the Cherokees broken in spirit and prey to vindictive government agents and greedy white landowners and bankers. Inspired by his criminal ancestors, his reading and his anger at abuses of the Indian, Starr embarks on a bankrobbing spree that earns him status as a legend. As the story opens, Starr is in prison waiting to be hanged. He is released, though, and many years later, wins fame as the star of a silent-film series based on his criminal career. While imaginatively reliving his past, Starr becomes victim of his own mystique to the point where he "couldn't see clearly where the made-up parts left off and the life began." Pursued by the ghosts of his past, he resumes his earlier criminal vocation. Historian Slotkin (The Crater) renders sharply observed period detail and speech in a rich, often lyrical prose especially engaging for history buffs. Although slow-moving, this lengthy saga is certainly provocative in the way it explores the siren song of our frontier myths.
  Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

• 

  Politics of Letters

  Richard Ohmann

  These essays by a Marxist critic who teaches English at Wesleyan range widely over mass culture. Advertising, to Ohmann, is an endless monologue extolling consumption and social climbing, while ads reinforce the domination of American life by corporations. One penetrating essay links the growth of popular magazines to their support from the advertising industry. Another iconoclastic piece argues that the computer has become a tool to control and "de-skill" workers, its liberating potential largely subverted by corporate agendas. Ohmann persuasively reads Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as a critique of class privilege, of culture as a badge of superiority. He examines the way TV trivializes political elections; looks at schools as conveyor-belts utilized to train a docile workforce; criticizes textbooks for subliminally discouraging students' inquisitiveness; and describes how writing classes could be restructured to encourage pupils to listen and think.
  Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

• 

  Writing of Women: Essays in a Renaissance

  Phyllis Rose

  New beliefs require new facts, and the political ferment of the sixties, including the new feminism, began to change the way we look at 'fact, ' at what is worth discussing and what is not, at what is major and what is minor. It began an exciting time of reassessment in literary studies. This book is a product of that time, and the reviews of which it is largely composed were a small part of the process of revaluation which I celebrate. - from Introduction by the author.

• 

  The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890

  Richard Slotkin

  In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America’s rise to wealth and power. Using Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the "savage" element be permitted to dominate the "civilized," Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.fIn The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of Americas Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the "savage" element be permitted to dominate the "civilized," Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

• 

  Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, and Charles Ives

  Joseph Reed

• 

  Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages

  Phyllis Rose

  In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses as examples the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor.

• 

  Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel

  William W. Stowe

  One can say . . . that Stowe has written a virtually error-free, accomplished book, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Mimesis, The Implied Reader, and The Act of Reading. - Melvin J. Friedman

• 

  The Crater

  Richard Slotkin

  The Crater recreates, with panoramic scope, a substantial setback in the Army of the Potomac's efforts to end the American Civil War decisively. On July 30th, 1864, during the siege of Petersburg, Union troops clandestinely dug a 500-foot tunnel under Confederate lines and detonated enough gunpowder to leave a 100-foot gap in their defenses. Yet the subsequent Union assault failed; the few soldiers who trickled into the crater (many African-American) were mercilessly shelled to death in what one witness called "a cauldron of Hell." The siege continued, and the war dragged on for another eight and a half months. Emphasizing the points of view of what seems like all the men who took part in the ill-fated endeavor, Slotkin paints a vast, detailed portrait not only of the "Battle of the Crater," but the whole spectrum of mid-19th-century American society. Freed slaves, Jewish jay hawkers, "Molly Maguires" (Irish Pennsylvanian coal miners), northern industrialists, and generals and commanders on both sides all jostle for attention in this painstakingly elaborate literary reenactment, although the use of flashbacks and the prodigious inclusion of military communiques slows the novel's pace somewhat. Most Civil War novels concern themselves ultimately with the reconciliation of the American republic; The Crater focuses on the bleaker issues of race and class which defined the remainder of the 19th century. From its meticulous depiction of Irish-Yankee antagonism during the tunnel's construction to the needless sacrifice (and subsequent scapegoating) of black troops in battle, the novel portrays the War between the States not as the end of the sectional crisis, but as the beginning of a socially divisive industrial order. --John M. Anderson

• 

  Spurki Mech

  Kachig Tololyan

• 

  Woman of Letters: The Life of Virginia Woolf

  Phyllis Rose

  "My very simple idea was that being a woman was important to Woolf and that this had affected the writing of her novels"

  Phyllis Rose

• 

  English in America: A Radical View of the Profession

  Richard Ohmann

  When it first appeared in 1976, this groundbreaking exploration of the influences of capitalism on the profession of English touched a nerve among educators and inspired Library Journal to declare, "This book should be read by all thoughtful Americans." Now, 20 years later, in a substantial new introduction that recontextualizes the book, Richard Ohmann addresses the critical furor over its initial publication, evaluates his own arguments in the aftermath of the Cold War, and locates the profession of English in the thick of the hotly contested culture wars. A remarkably prescient book whose claims have withstood two decades of fierce debate, English in America is widely considered to be as relevant today as ever. Wise, witty, and urbane, it has much to teach all students of English. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

• 

  Shaw’s Moral Vision: The Self and Salvation

  Alfred Turco

• 

  Faulkners Narrative

  Joseph Reed

• 

  Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860

  Richard Slotkin

  In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

• 

  English Biography in the Early Nineteenth Century, 1801-1838

  Joseph Reed

• 

  Shaw: The Style and the Man

  Richard Ohmann

  SHAW is one of those writers, like Browne, Johnson, Carlyle, and James, whose styles make patent special claims for attention. In reading one of these authors we intuitively feel style to be more than incidentally important: when manner stands out so persistently and so idiosyncratically it is sensible to ask why. That "why" is best taken as a request to be shown other char- acteristics of the writer that make it seem inevitable for him to have precisely his style and no other. We want an explanation, but the farthest that literary study can go toward giving one is to say: "This fact about Shaw, and this fact, and this other all belong together, and they illuminate each other when so re- garded. Although they may seem independent, possibly even contradictory, they make sense together under the rubric of this or that more inclusive truth about Shaw." Understanding of this sort is what I shall be looking for in the pages that follow.

  —From the Introduction.