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This book is a study of prominent and less‐familiar works of U.S. literary modernism that reveals a long history of English‐only Americanism: the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S. literary works written between the 1890s and the 1940s as playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby rewiring both narrative form and national identity. This consideration of the continuing presence of fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic multilingual cultures demonstrates their symbolic and material implications in naturalization and citizenship law, presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's massive demographic changes, this book brings into conversation a broadly multiethnic set of writers, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the interwar era and the defamiliarizing sway of radical experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Mixing languages, these authors spurned expectations for phonological exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism—that those who speak alike are ethically and politically like minded—multilingual modernists composed interwar novels as characteristically U.S. American because, not in spite, of their synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity’s restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, recalibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound’s slogan “Make It New” became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. “Making it new” yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

While the field of childhood studies has blossomed in recent years, few scholars have taken up the question of age more broadly as a lens for reading American literature. Adulthood and Other Fictions shows how a diverse array of nineteenth-century writers, thinkers, and artists responded to the rise of chronological age in social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. Adulthood and Other Fictions reads American literature as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, and it examines how our most well-known writers registered—and often resisted—age expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color. More than simply adding age to the list of identity categories that have become de rigeur sites of scholarly attention, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues that these other measures of social location (race, gender, sexuality, class) are largely legible through the seemingly more natural and essential identity defined by age. That is, longstanding cultural ideals about maturity and development anchor ideologies of heterosexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism, and in this sense, age rhetoric serves as one of our most pervasive disciplinary discourses. Writers including Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James anticipated the ageism of our moment, but they also recognized how age norms structure, and limit, the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum. Ultimately, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues for an intersectional understanding of age that challenges the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in US fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.

This book identifies an ontological turn in contemporary US fiction that distinguishes our current literary moment from both postmodernism and so-called post-postmodernism. This turn to ontology takes many forms, but in general this book highlights a body of literature—work from Colson Whitehead, Uzodinma Iweala, Karen Yamashita, Helena Viramontes, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Tom McCarthy—that favors presence over absence, being over meaning, and connection over reference. These authors’ interest in producing literary value ontologically rather than representationally stems from their sense that neoliberalism’s capacious grasp on contemporary language and discourse—its ability to control both sides of a conceptual debate or argument—has made it nearly impossible to write beyond neoliberalism’s grip. This is particularly distressing for authors invested in contemporary politics as neoliberalism renders any number of political problems circularly undecidable. Taking up four different political themes—human rights, the relation between public and private space, racial justice, and environmentalism—this book suggests that the ontological forms emerging in contemporary US fiction articulate a version of politics that might successfully evade neoliberal appropriation. This is a politics which replaces critique and its reliance on representation with ontology and its ever-shifting configurations and assemblages.

The book examines how James Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. It is animated by an examination of how external forces molded Baldwin’s personal, political, and psychological development and gave shape to his writing. The book views Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach. Crucially, it breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwin’s geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin’s life and work—his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing—while also contributing to wider discussions about race, identity, love and sexuality in postwar US culture. In this way, the book contributes to a broader understanding of some key twentieth-century themes—including the Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalism—but also brings a number of academically isolated disciplines into dialogue with each other. By viewing Baldwin as a subject in flux, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single paradigm, the project contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin’s life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. It argues that it is precisely by studying Baldwin as an individual and an artist in flux that one begins to uncover the ways in which his work coheres.

The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman in the mid-nineteenth century to George Oppen and Frank O'Hara in the mid‐late twentieth. Its origins lie in Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of ‘Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies’ in the second volume of his Democracy in America. It begins with a chapter on Tocqueville and Whitman, followed by a re‐evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. The other main poets considered are Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies, an attitude that can be traced back to the legacies of Marx and Freud, and conceives of ideology in deterministic terms as unconscious political alignment. To that extent it echoes Tocqueville's concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. The book draws upon a wide range of thinkers, including Madison, Tocqueville, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Riesman, Arendt, Benhabib and Cavell, as it seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

This book comprises sixteen essays from legal academics, literary experts, and influential judges. The book begins by investigating American Guys—the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists who populate American fiction. It then examines these manly men in relation to the law, while also highlighting the tensions underlying and complicating this type of masculinity. A second set of chapters examines Outsiders—men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. Chapters take up countertraditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Eli Roth’s Jewish lawyer. This book is the third in a series of volumes arising out of conferences at the University of Chicago Law School. Like its predecessors, this collection aims to reinvigorate the study of law and literature by broadening the range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the subject.

American Literature and the Long Downturn argues that the economic crisis of the 1970s established the conditions for a contemporary literary form: neoliberal apocalypse. Apocalyptic writing appears when groups perceive themselves as threatened and hope seems foreclosed. Focusing on James Baldwin, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace, Neoliberal Apocalypse reveals how contemporary American experience has been shaped by the tendency to imagine our present as apocalyptic.

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.

Recent scholarship has uncovered a spectrum of sociopolitical categories of World War I experience represented in American literature. American Writers and World War I resituates this collective focus on the multifaceted nature of war experience, by considering writers as idiosyncratic individuals—rather than as members of a particular constituency of identity. Looking at texts produced throughout the careers of Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden, Thomas Boyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laurence Stallings, and Ernest Hemingway, David Rennie argues that authors’ war writing continuously evolved in response to the unfolding developments of their careers and personalities. War writing was implicated in, and influenced by, wider cultural forces such as governmental censorship, the publishing business, advertising, and the Hollywood film industry. Studying the lives of individual authors and the environments in which they worked reveals that writers did not demonstrate static, unvarying attitudes to the war, and that their depictions of it were repeatedly shaped by the practicalities of authorship. Rennie discusses the importance of American cultural and literary precedents, which offered writers means of assessing the war, and argues that even authors’ hallmark “anti-war” works are in fact characterized by an awareness of the war’s nuanced effects on society and individuals.

This book considers the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of American literature, from the eighteenth century to the present day. It discusses how the antipodes, as both a philosophical idea and as a historical fact, came to influence how American writers in the nineteenth century conceived of Australasia after the settlement of this South Pacific region by the British. From this perspective, classic American writers of the nineteenth century regarded Australia as their own country’s doppelganger, the British colony where a War of Independence had never happened. The book will also consider how and why the significance of Australia and New Zealand for American writers has for so long been overlooked, despite the fact that these regions attracted the attention of canonical figures such as Brockden Brown, Irving, Melville, Thoreau and many others. It argues that American cultural critics have not traditionally been comfortable with considering how their literature engaged with the specters of British colonialism, and that this has produced a distorted understanding of American literature as committed primarily to a rhetoric of constitutional independence. It will continue to track the importance of Australasia to American writers during the twentieth and twenty-first century, taking into account the significance of both World Wars, Vietnam, and other forms of transnational cultural exchange. It suggests how the antipodean figure of a world upside down continues to haunt American writers through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.

This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th century facilitated an imagined spiritual and aesthetic accord that bridged the Pacific, and this study reads the expression and repercussions of these links in American Orientalist and Asian American poetry. After considering both the transcendence and constraints of a structure of alliance between East and West in the introductory chapter, the first half of the study examines two key American instigators of Orientalist poetics, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, who imagined an identity between Eastern philosophy and idealized notions of America. Their literary alliances imposed a singular burden on Asian American poets, and the second half of the study considers a range of formal negotiations with this legacy in the poetry of Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. In examining avant‐garde Asian American poetry against an American Orientalist past, this book reads the intersection of modernist and minority poetics.

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as “animality studies,” which focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both “human” and “animal” became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of “the jungle” was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud; once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the “beast within,” shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. This book’s central argument is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James and Frank Norris and cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island and the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” This book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.

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.

Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model of rational exposition institutionalized under the Enlightenment. And yet, as the rhetorical figure of digression has grown increasingly marginalized within the decorum of public discourse, it has come to occupy a central position in the private discursive world of poetry. This book outlines an anatomy of “the excursus” within twentieth-Century American poetics; moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to theories of identity, this study considers the various spheres in which American writers of the period revise prior models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in the modern poem. The opening section considers the manner in which Wallace Stevens employs digression within the ars poetica genre to deconstruct aesthetic theory under High Modernism; the second chapter examines Marianne Moore’s use of the excursus to organize archival knowledge in the Progressive poetry of instruction; the third section turns to Lyn Hejinian’s construction of a digressive narratology intended to unsettle master-narratives of the Cold War era; the fourth chapter treats digression as a strategy for fashioning the self in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara; and the book concludes with a survey of “Elliptical” strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery’s aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the 21st Century.

Cold War Friendships explores the plight of the Asian ally of the American wars in Korea and Vietnam. Enlisted into proxy warfare, this figure is not a friend, but a “friendly,” a wartime convenience enlisted to serve a superpower. It is through this deeply unequal relation, however, that the Cold War friendly secures her own integrity and insists upon her place in the neocolonial imperium. This study reads a set of highly enterprising wartime subjects who make their way to the United States via difficult attachments. American forces ventured into newly postcolonial Korea and Vietnam, both plunged into civil wars, to draw the dividing line of the Cold War. The strange success of containment and militarization in Korea unraveled in Vietnam, but the friendly marks the significant continuity between these hot wars. In both cases, the friendly justified the fight: she was also a political necessity who redeployed Cold War alliances, and, remarkably, made her way to America. As subjects in process—and indeed, proto-Americans—these figures are prime literary subjects, whose processes of becoming are on full display in Asian American novels and testimonies of these wars. Literary writings on both of these conflicts are presently burgeoning, and Cold War Friendships performs close analyses of key texts whose stylistic constraints and contradictions—shot through with political and historical nuance—present complex gestures of alliance.

Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing argues that the period of decolonization in Britain, the United States, France, and the Caribbean was characterized by dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists. As the British and French Empires collapsed and the United States rose to global power, and as intellectuals from the decolonizing world challenged the cultural hegemony of the West, some anthropologists began to assess their discipline’s complicity with imperialism and experimented with literary forms and techniques. The book shows that the “literary turn” in anthropology took place earlier than has conventionally been assumed, in the 1950s rather than the 1970s and 1980s. Simultaneously, some literary writers reacted to the end of modernist artistic experimentation by turning to ethnographic methods for representing the people and cultural practices of Britain, France, and the United States, bringing anthropology back home. The book discusses literary writers who had a significant professional engagement with anthropology and brought some of its techniques and research questions into literary composition: Barbara Pym (Britain), Ursula Le Guin and Saul Bellow (United States), Édouard Glissant (Martinique), and Michel Leiris (France). On the side of ethnography, there is analysis of works by anthropologists who adopted literary forms for their writing about culture: Laura Bohannan (United States), Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss (France), and Mary Douglas (Britain). The book concludes with an afterword that shows how the literature–anthropology conversation continues into the postcolonial period in the work of the Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh and the Jamaican author-sociologist Erna Brodber.

The Emotional Life of the Great Depression documents how Americans responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression. Unlike most books about the 1930s, which focus almost exclusively on the despair of the American people during the decade, The Emotional Life of the Great Depression explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. In expanding the canon of Great Depression emotions, the book draws on an eclectic archive of sources, including the ravings of a would-be presidential assassin, stock market investment handbooks, a Cleveland serial murder case, Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, King Edward VIII’s abdication from his throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman, and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. In concert with these, it offers new readings of the imaginative literature of the period, from obscure Christian apocalyptic novels and H.P. Lovecraft short stories to classics such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright’s Native Son. The upshot is a new take on the Great Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (the stock market crash, unemployment, the passage of the Social Security Act) but also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities, its structures of feeling.

This book reassesses William Faulkner’s engagement with modern media technologies and transportation systems. It argues that Faulkner’s inveterate interest in figures of flight, automobiles, radio, phonographs, photographs, and other modern techno-media was secretly motivated by a profound and ongoing aesthetic tug of war in his writing. He resolved this tension between artistic modernism and the vanished worlds of antebellum romance by a recourse to tropes borrowed from the modern media system. These tropes masked his investment in romance materials, giving it a modern overlay, and allowed him to look critically upon the persistence of superannuated romance within the modern media ecology itself. This economical and generative strategy allowed Faulkner to “eat his cake and have it” as regards those romance materials and to make entirely novel moves in the rapidly changing form of the novel between 1929 and 1936.