John Neal, American Romance, and International Romanticism

Gilmore, P.

In this essay, Gilmore argues that examining the largely forgotten early romances of John Neal within a transatlantic framework leads to a reconsideration of our understanding of romanticism in the United States. Focusing on Randolph (1823) and Logan (1822), he draws parallels between Neal’s criticism and fiction and the writings of European romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In doing so, Gilmore contends that Neal provides an alternative understanding of the politics, history, and poetics of romanticism and the romance in the United States. Over the past century, the followers of F. O. Matthiessen and Richard Chase and their New Americanist critics have tended to describe romanticism and the romance in terms of an idealistic retreat into nature or aesthetic form. Furthermore, both mid-twentieth-century critics and later revisionists emphasized a national dimension to American romanticism and the American romance, either as epitomizing a distinctly American literature or as reinforcing or contesting dominant conceptions of the United States. In contrast, he argues that placing the romance, particularly as espoused and practiced by John Neal, at the center of our examination of romanticism in the United States foregrounds the importance of an international literary and sociocultural framework. In this light, romanticism appears less an ideological retreat from modernity or a nationalistic vehicle than a transnational, dialectical engagement with modernity’s atomization of the individual.

The "Plain Facts" of Fine Paper in "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids"

Thompson, G.

Thompson’s essay intervenes in conversations about mid-nineteenth-century authorship and print culture by distinguishing between the economy of paper and the economy of print. He argues that critical treatments of Melville’s work, and particularly "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (1855), have not adequately attended to the material economy of paper that existed for Melville before the cycle of literary publication, distribution, and circulation began. Living in the important papermaking region of rural west Massachusetts allowed Melville to experience the raw materials of that economic sector not as a distant or vicarious consumer but, following his visit to the Old Berkshire Mill in Dalton in the winter of 1851, as a specialized purchaser. Instead of treating paper as a metonym of literary-market exchange, then, Thompson’s essay examines Melville’s experience and imagining of this raw material—literally avant la lettre—as a way of better understanding the economy of a substance whose manufactured sizes (folio, octavo, and duodecimo) he had already used to classify whales in Moby-Dick and on which his recalcitrant copyist, Bartleby, refuses to write.

The Moccasin Telegraph: Sign-Talk Autobiography and Pretty-shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows

Yandell, K.

In 1931, Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield delivered her oral autobiography to Frank Linderman, simultaneously through an interpreter of spoken Crow, and without translation to Linderman in Indian Sign Language. Pretty Shield’s and Linderman’s use of the sign language within this autobiography, coupled with Pretty Shield’s explanations of historical use of the sign language among precontact Crow people, suggests new views of various critical problems within the hybrid genre of American Indian autobiography, of which this text is one example. Pretty Shield’s husband, Goes Ahead, used the sign language to scout for General George Armstrong Custer at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn; Pretty Shield’s account of the sign language in this battle additionally provides a rare and understudied interpretation of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and of the larger American frontier histories in which sign talk played a significant role.

Jazz, Black Transnationalism, and the Political Aesthetics of Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama

Lowney, J.

Lowney’s essay examines how Langston Hughes’s cultural work in the 1950s and early 1960s illustrates the challenge of developing a progressive black transnationalist literary culture. It concentrates especially on Hughes’s longest and most ambitious poem, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), which renders his dual commitment to a black transnationalist public and an innovative African diaspora jazz poetics. Ask Your Mama features the interaction of African cultures in the Americas and Africa, with its evocation of Afro-Caribbean as well as African American music and its movement among different sites of black revolutionary struggle. In this context, jazz plays an explicitly political role in expressing the revolutionary desire for black liberation in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. This is most evident in the opening mood of Ask Your Mama, "Cultural Exchange," which introduces the black transnationalist network of musical forms, proper names, and social locations that reverberate throughout the poem. Lowney’s essay discusses the implications of Hughes’s ironic allusion to the "cultural exchange" of African American "jazz ambassadors," who were funded by the US State Department to perform in Africa in the 1950s. In doing so, it draws from recent research in jazz studies by Penny Von Eschen and Ingrid Monson to underscore the historical complexity and political incisiveness of Hughes’s enactment of a black transnationalist public in the poem.

Literatures of Exile and Return: Jack Kerouac and Quebec

Melehy, H.

Melehy’s essay explores Jack Kerouac’s relationship to the Québécois diaspora of which his Massachusetts family was a part, his experience of English as a foreign language, and how these inform his aesthetics. Melehy situates the discussion in debates on multilingualism in the study of American literature as well as theories of minor literature and translation. He demonstrates that Kerouac’s realism involves an effort to bring into dominant US representation many aspects of the diaspora that were ideologically hidden. Part of this consideration is the reception of Kerouac in Quebec as a major literary figure who made immense contributions to reflections on hybrid North American identity. In the appreciation of Kerouac by Quebec novelist and critic Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, the author shows that early critical dismissals of Kerouac in the United States were closely connected to the aesthetic problems he raised in his work that were specific to his awareness of the diaspora. Melehy then turns his attention to some of Kerouac’s lesser-known novels, especially two that focus mainly on French-Canadian culture and identity, Dr. Sax (1959) and Satori in Paris (1966). Proceeding to a commentary of a Québécois rewriting of Kerouac, Jacques Poulin’s 1984 Volkswagen Blues, Melehy demonstrates this novel’s exploration of North American identities in connection with Quebec and the role of literature in mapping them. The conclusion assesses Kerouac’s contribution to American literature as a meditation on transnational, translingual identity.

Contested Terrain: The Suburbs as Region

Wilhite, K.

Wilhite contends that a general indebtedness to Cold War cultural critique has kept literary scholars from reading the suburbs and suburban fiction for what they truly are: the endgame and final outpost of US regionalism. Drawing on discussions of regional writing and cultural geography, Wilhite argues that we should read suburban narratives for the ways they update and revise long-standing regionalist approaches to local and global concerns: the charged insularity of the domestic sphere, the geographic containment of racial difference, the repressive construction of a common national identity, and the imperial reach of nation. As a mode of geopolitical analysis, regionalism clarifies the fraught relationship between isolationism and imperialism that has shaped US residential geography. When read as form of regional writing, suburban fiction exposes our homes and neighborhoods as national and transnational "sites of contestation." To develop this line of thinking, Wilhite offers Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) and Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft (2004) as case studies for his broader claims about region and the spatial effects of residential sprawl and suburban domesticity. Franzen and Lee both locate the political subject within the competing ideologies of privatism and globalization, but they produce radically different responses to the suburb as a symptomatic fact of twenty-first-century life in the United States. Taken together, these novels offer divergent paths for understanding the suburbs as a uniquely problematic and potentially transformative cultural and geographic region.

Authors, Readers, Contexts, Texts

Levine, R. S.

* Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 * Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America

Rifkin, M.

* Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment * Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic

Wong, E.

* Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom * Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History

White, E.

* Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry * Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s * The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word

Moore, J. P.

* Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers * Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography

Snyder, K.

* Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire * The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. DuBois and the Race Concept at Midcentury

Green, T. T.

* Superpower: Heroes, Ghosts, and the Paranormal in American Culture * Master Mechanics and Wicked Wizards: Images of the American Scientist as Hero and Villain from Colonial Times to the Present

Hattenhauer, D.

* Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II America * Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction * Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America

Pecchenino, D.

* No Safe Spaces: Recasting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the American Theater * Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith

Ybarra, P.

* Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation * The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

Higgins, D. M.

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