Joanna Brooks
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195332919
- eISBN:
- 9780199851263
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332919.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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 by which 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 early black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding 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 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 18th-century black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.Less
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 by which 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 early black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding 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 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 18th-century black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century ...
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The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.Less
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.
Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, and Helena Wahlström
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719089596
- eISBN:
- 9781781707289
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089596.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter situates the study in both literary and socio-historical contexts, focusing on earlier discussions of the American orphan figure in literary and social history and elaborating especially ...
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This chapter situates the study in both literary and socio-historical contexts, focusing on earlier discussions of the American orphan figure in literary and social history and elaborating especially on literature as cultural memory. The chapter traces the central position of orphans in nineteenth-century American literary history as it has been constructed in the twentieth century; orphans have played major roles in a dominant white male tradition in criticism, but also in gendered and ethnic challenges to that tradition. Previous critical discussions of orphans typically focus on children’s literature, or on nineteenth-century literature, but nevertheless offer useful insights into the historically shifting roles and cultural work of orphan characters, linked to social and political developments in the US. The chapter also addresses ideas of the orphan, childhood, and family, and how these ideas operate in social and academic debates over multiculturalism, the US canon, and national belonging.Less
This chapter situates the study in both literary and socio-historical contexts, focusing on earlier discussions of the American orphan figure in literary and social history and elaborating especially on literature as cultural memory. The chapter traces the central position of orphans in nineteenth-century American literary history as it has been constructed in the twentieth century; orphans have played major roles in a dominant white male tradition in criticism, but also in gendered and ethnic challenges to that tradition. Previous critical discussions of orphans typically focus on children’s literature, or on nineteenth-century literature, but nevertheless offer useful insights into the historically shifting roles and cultural work of orphan characters, linked to social and political developments in the US. The chapter also addresses ideas of the orphan, childhood, and family, and how these ideas operate in social and academic debates over multiculturalism, the US canon, and national belonging.
Betty Booth Donohue
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780813037370
- eISBN:
- 9780813042336
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813037370.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book, written partly in the Cherokee syllabary by a Cherokee critic, argues that William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation shows evidence of American Indian poetics. It is a revisioning of the ...
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This book, written partly in the Cherokee syllabary by a Cherokee critic, argues that William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation shows evidence of American Indian poetics. It is a revisioning of the genesis of American literary history. The book reveals that, from its earliest moments, American literature has owed its distinctive shape to the determining influence of American Indian thought and culture. It demonstrates the extent of this influence by identifying the scores of Native historical, biographical, and ceremonial texts, as well as vocabularies, compositional principles, and rhetorical strategies, embedded in Bradford's history. The book emphasizes that American literature did not begin with European-American colonial writings, but rather in the oral traditions and ceremonial rituals of America's five hundred indigenous Nations. The verbal power of these ancient oralities invaded the newly forming American letters.Less
This book, written partly in the Cherokee syllabary by a Cherokee critic, argues that William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation shows evidence of American Indian poetics. It is a revisioning of the genesis of American literary history. The book reveals that, from its earliest moments, American literature has owed its distinctive shape to the determining influence of American Indian thought and culture. It demonstrates the extent of this influence by identifying the scores of Native historical, biographical, and ceremonial texts, as well as vocabularies, compositional principles, and rhetorical strategies, embedded in Bradford's history. The book emphasizes that American literature did not begin with European-American colonial writings, but rather in the oral traditions and ceremonial rituals of America's five hundred indigenous Nations. The verbal power of these ancient oralities invaded the newly forming American letters.
John Lowney
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041334
- eISBN:
- 9780252099939
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041334.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and ...
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There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.Less
There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.
John Lowney
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041334
- eISBN:
- 9780252099939
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041334.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through ...
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Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.Less
Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.
Jared Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036705
- eISBN:
- 9780252093814
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036705.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant ...
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This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant shift from novel-writing to periodical culture. In particular, the chapter examines the career of Charles Brockden Brown as he draws influences from other writers during the time while also developing an editorial function which he would work to define in his last fictions and in his periodical work of his final years. This chapter also explores the writings of a particular author whom Brown has read—Hannah Webster Foster, whose career witnesses an even more abrupt turn away from the novel.Less
This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant shift from novel-writing to periodical culture. In particular, the chapter examines the career of Charles Brockden Brown as he draws influences from other writers during the time while also developing an editorial function which he would work to define in his last fictions and in his periodical work of his final years. This chapter also explores the writings of a particular author whom Brown has read—Hannah Webster Foster, whose career witnesses an even more abrupt turn away from the novel.
Jared Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036705
- eISBN:
- 9780252093814
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036705.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
A transatlantic literary form that refused to break with British cultural models and genealogy, the early American magazine had at its center the anonymous authority of the editor and a porous ...
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A transatlantic literary form that refused to break with British cultural models and genealogy, the early American magazine had at its center the anonymous authority of the editor and a porous distinction between reader and author. Esteemed subscribers were treated as magnets to attract other subscribers, and subscribers were prompted to become contributors, giving these early American publications the appearance of public forums. This book reexamines these publications and their reach to show how magazine culture was a multivocal, as opposed to novel, culture. The book describes how those who invested considerable energies in this form—including some of the period's most important political and literary figures such as Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving—sought to establish a very different model of literary culture than what came to define American literary history and its scholarship. The book cautions against privileging novels or authors as the essential touchstones of American literary history and instead encourages an understanding of how the “editorial function” favored by magazine culture shaped reading and writing practices. Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, the book reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives.Less
A transatlantic literary form that refused to break with British cultural models and genealogy, the early American magazine had at its center the anonymous authority of the editor and a porous distinction between reader and author. Esteemed subscribers were treated as magnets to attract other subscribers, and subscribers were prompted to become contributors, giving these early American publications the appearance of public forums. This book reexamines these publications and their reach to show how magazine culture was a multivocal, as opposed to novel, culture. The book describes how those who invested considerable energies in this form—including some of the period's most important political and literary figures such as Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving—sought to establish a very different model of literary culture than what came to define American literary history and its scholarship. The book cautions against privileging novels or authors as the essential touchstones of American literary history and instead encourages an understanding of how the “editorial function” favored by magazine culture shaped reading and writing practices. Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, the book reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives.
Gene Andrew Jarrett
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814743386
- eISBN:
- 9780814743874
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814743386.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. This book traces the ...
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The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. This book traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. It examines texts of every sort to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. The book argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition. Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama's creative writing. This book is a bold explanation of what's at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.Less
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. This book traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. It examines texts of every sort to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. The book argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition. Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama's creative writing. This book is a bold explanation of what's at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.
Sarah Rivett
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190492564
- eISBN:
- 9780190492595
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190492564.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
From their earliest encounters in the Americas, Europeans struggled to make sense of the words spoken by the numerous indigenous tribes that surrounded them. Unscripted America recounts a colonial ...
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From their earliest encounters in the Americas, Europeans struggled to make sense of the words spoken by the numerous indigenous tribes that surrounded them. Unscripted America recounts a colonial struggle between peoples of European descent who aspired to map native languages according to Christian and Enlightenment cosmologies and indigenous resistance to this ascribed meaning. Unscripted America reconstructs an archive of indigenous language texts in order to present a new account of their impact of comparative philology on the formation of US literary culture. American Indian language texts reveal poignant and contradictory histories of preservation through erasure: each stands as a record of colonial destruction as well as an archive ready for recovery and recuperation. Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. What scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words.Less
From their earliest encounters in the Americas, Europeans struggled to make sense of the words spoken by the numerous indigenous tribes that surrounded them. Unscripted America recounts a colonial struggle between peoples of European descent who aspired to map native languages according to Christian and Enlightenment cosmologies and indigenous resistance to this ascribed meaning. Unscripted America reconstructs an archive of indigenous language texts in order to present a new account of their impact of comparative philology on the formation of US literary culture. American Indian language texts reveal poignant and contradictory histories of preservation through erasure: each stands as a record of colonial destruction as well as an archive ready for recovery and recuperation. Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. What scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words.
Jeffrey J. Williams
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263806
- eISBN:
- 9780823266432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263806.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter profiles Gordon Hutner, founding and long-time editor of the major journal, American Literary History, and critic of American literature. It tells how he founded the journal and the ...
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This chapter profiles Gordon Hutner, founding and long-time editor of the major journal, American Literary History, and critic of American literature. It tells how he founded the journal and the ins-and-outs of editing it. It also discusses his recent work inventorying modern American fiction. It draws on an in-depth interview that gives many revealing details about his work and career.Less
This chapter profiles Gordon Hutner, founding and long-time editor of the major journal, American Literary History, and critic of American literature. It tells how he founded the journal and the ins-and-outs of editing it. It also discusses his recent work inventorying modern American fiction. It draws on an in-depth interview that gives many revealing details about his work and career.
June Howard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198821397
- eISBN:
- 9780191867897
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198821397.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The second chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time, titled “Local Knowledge and Book-Learning,” offers a revision of received American literary history. It ...
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The second chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time, titled “Local Knowledge and Book-Learning,” offers a revision of received American literary history. It argues that the figure of the schoolteacher personates the contested connection between the particular place and the world beyond. The one-room schoolhouse, in particular, is a site where provincial and metropolitan or cosmopolitan knowledges meet. These topoi play an important role in local color fiction in the nineteenth century, and persist into later periods. The chapter includes Southern, Midwestern, Appalachian, and New England examples; the difference between African-American and Native American representations proves especially revealing. The chapter also considers the implications of this work for college and university teachers, arguing for acknowledgement of their commonalities with primary and secondary school teachers.Less
The second chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time, titled “Local Knowledge and Book-Learning,” offers a revision of received American literary history. It argues that the figure of the schoolteacher personates the contested connection between the particular place and the world beyond. The one-room schoolhouse, in particular, is a site where provincial and metropolitan or cosmopolitan knowledges meet. These topoi play an important role in local color fiction in the nineteenth century, and persist into later periods. The chapter includes Southern, Midwestern, Appalachian, and New England examples; the difference between African-American and Native American representations proves especially revealing. The chapter also considers the implications of this work for college and university teachers, arguing for acknowledgement of their commonalities with primary and secondary school teachers.
Julia H. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814752555
- eISBN:
- 9780814752579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814752555.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This concluding chapter contemplates the present state of Afro-Asian relations and begins by thinking about the connections that exist between the past and the present in which African Americans and ...
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This concluding chapter contemplates the present state of Afro-Asian relations and begins by thinking about the connections that exist between the past and the present in which African Americans and Asian Americans find themselves. It focuses on the early twentieth century as a way to elaborate the prevalent, late twentieth-century belief that Afro-Asian relations have always been and will always be primarily hostile because of essentialized cultural differences. The most helpful way to understand the long span of Afro-Asian American history is to think of the past as a corrective that develops an unquestioned account of that history and as a gloss that explicates and contextualizes that relationship. The book concludes that writers were already writing and anticipating the early twenty-first century's obsessions; Asian American and African American cultural productions already indicate alternative narratives of American literary history that look beyond traditional field markers.Less
This concluding chapter contemplates the present state of Afro-Asian relations and begins by thinking about the connections that exist between the past and the present in which African Americans and Asian Americans find themselves. It focuses on the early twentieth century as a way to elaborate the prevalent, late twentieth-century belief that Afro-Asian relations have always been and will always be primarily hostile because of essentialized cultural differences. The most helpful way to understand the long span of Afro-Asian American history is to think of the past as a corrective that develops an unquestioned account of that history and as a gloss that explicates and contextualizes that relationship. The book concludes that writers were already writing and anticipating the early twenty-first century's obsessions; Asian American and African American cultural productions already indicate alternative narratives of American literary history that look beyond traditional field markers.
June Howard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198821397
- eISBN:
- 9780191867897
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198821397.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the ...
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The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.Less
The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.
