American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast ...precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the spirit of ...the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust. This book explores the means bywhich the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as earlyBlack and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals,and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.
This wide-ranging comparative study argues for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within the transamerican and multilingual contexts that ...shaped it. Drawing on an array of texts in English, French and Spanish by both canonical and neglected writers and activists, Anna Brickhouse investigates interactions between US, Latin American and Caribbean literatures. Her many examples and case studies include the Mexican genealogies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the rewriting of Uncle Tom's Cabin by a Haitian dramatist, and a French Caribbean translation of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Brickhouse uncovers lines of literary influence and descent linking Philadelphia and Havana, Port-au-Prince and Boston, Paris and New Orleans. She argues for a new understanding of this most formative period of literary production in the United States as a 'transamerican renaissance', a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.
The shape of the signifier Michaels, Walter Benn; Michaels, Walter Benn
2004., 20131031, 2013, 2004, c2004., 2004-01-01
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The Shape of the Signifieris a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from "Against ...Theory" toOur America--it anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe.
With signature virtuosity, Michaels shows how the replacement of ideological difference (we believe different things) with identitarian difference (we speak different languages, we have different bodies and different histories) organizes the thinking of writers from Richard Rorty to Octavia Butler to Samuel Huntington to Kathy Acker. He then examines how this shift produces the narrative logic of texts ranging from Toni Morrison'sBelovedto Michael Hardt and Toni Negri'sEmpire. As with everything Michaels writes,The Shape of the Signifieris sure to leave controversy and debate in its wake.
With the 1981 publication of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa ushered in an era of Chicana lesbian ...writing. But while these two writers have achieved iconic status, observers of the Chicana/o experience have been slow to perceive the existence of a whole community—lesbian and straight, male as well as female—who write about the Chicana lesbian experience. To create a first full map of that community, this book explores a wide range of plays, novels, and short stories by Chicana/o authors that depict lesbian characters or lesbian desire. Catrióna Rueda Esquibel starts from the premise that Chicana/o communities, theories, and feminisms cannot be fully understood without taking account of the perspectives and experiences of Chicana lesbians. To open up these perspectives, she engages in close readings of works centered around the following themes: La Llorona, the Aztec Princess, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, girlhood friendships, rural communities and history, and Chicana activism. Her investigation broadens the community of Chicana lesbian writers well beyond Moraga and Anzaldúa, while it also demonstrates that the histories of Chicana lesbians have had to be written in works of fiction because these women have been marginalized and excluded in canonical writings on Chicano life and experience.
Through other continents Dimock, Wai Chee; Dimock, Wai Chee
2006., 20081020, 2008, 2006, 2009, c2006., 2007-01-01
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What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock’s sustained ...effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James’s novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, ...practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does.In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass.Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.
Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary ...and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave jurisdiction - at least according to abolitionists and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.Edlie Wong critically recuperates these cases in an effort to reexamine and redefine the legal construction of freedom, will, and consent. This study places such historically central anti-slavery figures as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and William Lloyd Garrison alongside such lesser-known slave plaintiffs as Lucy Ann Delaney, Grace, Catharine Linda, Med, and Harriet Robinson Scott. Situated at the confluence of literary criticism, feminism, and legal history, Neither Fugitive nor Free presents the freedom suit as a "new" genre to African American and American literary studies.
Brings attention to several contemporary writers that have received little or no critical attention, including Eduardo Halfón, Manuel Muñoz, Patricia Engel, and Amanda Calderón.Since the 1990s, there ...has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latina/o writers. The extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latina/o and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category-Latina/o-under which we group this literature.Latina/o Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question "What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literatureLatina/o?" From this question a host of others spin out: What does that grouping allow us to see, predispose us to see, and preclude us from seeing? If the grouping-which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people and groups under a seemingly homogeneous label-tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions,Latina/o Literature Unboundseeks to unbind Latina/o literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies thanLatina/ofor organizing and analyzing this literature. Following a neo-formalist interpretive model that privileges reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, the book argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature. Finally,Latina/o Literature Unboundsuggests some ways in which we might want to proceed as we move forward with future studies of the writing we have come to identify asLatina/o.Rethinks Latinx literature from the standpoint of literary genre rather than racial or ethnic identity.Critically questions the prevailing monolithic markers of Latinx literature by interrogating their usefulness for thinking about such a diverse body of literary works.
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Maria del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are ...represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jose Marti, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernandez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
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