The second of three volumes by Alan Wald that track the political and personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers,Trinity of Passioncarries forward the chronicle launched inExiles ...from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. In this volume Wald delves into literary, emotional, and ideological trajectories of radical cultural workers in the era when the International Brigades fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the United States battled in World War II (1941-45). Probing in rich and haunting detail the controversial impact of the Popular Front on literary culture, he explores the ethical and aesthetic challenges that pro-Communist writers faced.Wald presents a cross section of literary talent, from the famous to the forgotten, the major to the minor. The writers examined include Len Zinberg (a.k.a. Ed Lacy), John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Henry Roth, Lauren Gilfillan, Ruth McKenney, Morris U. Schappes, and Jo Sinclair. He also uncovers dramatic new information about Arthur Miller's complex commitment to the Left.Confronting heartfelt questions about Jewish masculinity, racism at the core of liberal democracy, the corrosion of utopian dreams, and the thorny interaction between antifascism and Communism, Wald re-creates the intellectual and cultural landscape of a remarkable era.
Navigating deftly among historical and literary readings, Cathy Schlund-Vials examines the analogous yet divergent experiences of Asian Americans and Jewish Americans inModeling Citizenship. She ...investigates how these model minority groups are shaped by the shifting terrain of naturalization law and immigration policy, using the lens of naturalization, not assimilation, to underscore questions of nation-state affiliation and sense of belonging.Modeling Citizenshipexamines fiction, memoir, and drama to reflect on how the logic of naturalization has operated at discrete moments in the twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on two exemplary literary works. For example, Schlund-Vials shows how Mary Antin's Jewish-themed play The Promised Land is reworked into a more contemporary Chinese American context in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land.In her compelling analysis, Schlund-Vials amplifies the structural, cultural, and historical significance of these works and the themes they address.
This study of character in a comparative context presents a new approach to transatlantic literary history. Rereading Romanticism across national, generic and chronological boundaries, and through ...close textual comparisons, it offers exciting possibilities for rediscovering how literature engages and persuades readers of the reality of character. Historically grounded in the eighteenth-century philosophical, political and cultural conditions that generated nation-based literary history, it reveals alternative narratives to those of origin and succession, influence and reception. It also reintroduces rhetoric and poetics as ways of addressing questions about uniqueness and representativeness in character creation, epistemological issues of identity and impersonation, and the generation of literary value. Drawing comparisons between works from Alexander Pope and Cotton Mather through Robert Burns, Jane Austen, John Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, R. W. Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville, to George Eliot and Henry James, Susan Manning reveals surprising metaphorical, metonymic and performative connections.
After ten years of selecting great books from writers, new and established, Prairie Schooner celebrates the first decade of its Book Prize series by offering this collection of excerpts from each ...year's winners in fiction and poetry. Writers such as Brock Clarke, Anne Finger, Rynn Williams, and Paul Guest open windows to ordinary and fantastic experience showcasing the liveliness and power of contemporary literature. Greg Hrbek's darkly comic, genre-bending tales stand alongside Ted Gilley's stories about achieving bliss through pain and John Keeble's reflections on community and the difficulty of love. Here Shane Book's poems serve as an elegiac witness to suffering, while Kathleen Flenniken's poems consider ordinary women constructing their own significance, and Kara Candito's explore sex, loss, and human passions. Whether the topic is fantastic or quotidian, childbirth or monsters, South American airplane disaster or suburban Wisconsin, this writing carries us to the furthest reaches of human experience.
The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views ...often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. Author Drew Lopenzina reexamines a literature that has been compulsively "corrected" and overinscribed with the norms and expectations of the dominant culture, while simultaneously invoking the often violent tensions of "contact" and the processes of unwitnessing by which Native histories and accomplishments were effectively erased from the colonial record. In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native- centered perspective.
Nelson provides a study of the ways in which white American authors constructed `race' in their works from the time of the first colonists up to the period of the Civil War. She focuses on some ...eleven texts, including The Last of the Mohicans, Melville's Benito Cereno, and Harriet Jacobs's Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl.
This book examines poets and artists in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how they worked to make language into material objects and material objects ...into language.
From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, a familiar scene appears and reappears in American literature: a speaker stands before a crowd of men and women, attempting to mitigate their natural ...suspicions in order to form a body of federated wills. In this important study of the relationship of literature and politics, Mark Patterson argues that this scene restates political issues in literary terms and embodies the essential problems of American democracy facing both politicians and writers: What is autonomy? How does representation work? Where does true authority lie? Beginning with the debate over ratification of the United States Constitution, Patterson follows out the complex literary consequences of these questions.
A work of literary history and criticism, this study also offers valuable insights into matters of political and literary theory. In separate chapters on Benjamin Frankin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown in the post-Revolutionary period and on Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, and Melville in the antebellum period, Patterson provides a series of brilliant readings of major texts in order to describe how American writers have conflated political and literary concerns as a means to their own social authority.
Originally published in 1988.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The first book to chart autonomy's conceptual growth in Native American literature from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, A New Continent of Liberty examines, against the ...backdrop of Euro-American literature, how Native American authors have sought to reclaim and redefine distinctive versions of an ideal of self-rule grounded in the natural world. Beginning with the writings of Samson Occom, and extending through a range of fiction and nonfiction works by William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, Geoff Hamilton sketches a movement of gradual but resolute ascent: from often desperate early efforts, pitted against the historical realities of genocide and cultural annihilation, to preserve any sense of self and community, toward expressions of a resurgent autonomy that affirm new, iIndigenous models of eunomia, a fertile blending of human and natural orders.
First book to chart the rise of an independent Native American literature from the late 18th to the early 21st centuries.
In the 1790s, a single conversational circle—the Friendly Club—united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary ...criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place—the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads—geographical, professional, and otherwise—of American literary and intellectual culture. Waterman argues that the relationships among club members' novels, plays, poetry, diaries, legal writing, and medical essays lead to important first examples of a distinctively American literature and also illuminate the local, national, and transatlantic circuits of influence and information that club members called "the republic of intellect." He addresses topics ranging from political conspiracy in the gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown to the opening of William Dunlap's Park Theatre, from early American debates on gendered conversation to the publication of the first American medical journal. Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized.
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