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The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem
to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American
literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically
since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place
seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both
troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades
and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem,
interrogating each other. Taken together, the essays challenge
depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and
teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both
familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a
born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the
Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing,
marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and
twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally
wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies,
queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies,
environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to
explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place
are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations
of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and
bodies—five political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for
some of the most provocative new work being done in American
literary studies. Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only
for scholars and students already well grounded in the study of
nineteenth-century American literature and culture, but for anyone,
scholar or student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most
vibrant work in the field. Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie
Foote, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo,
Caroline Levander, Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana
Luciano, Timothy Marr, Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo,
Mark Storey, Matthew E. Suazo, and Edward Sugden.
The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem
to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American
literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically
since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place
seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both
troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades
and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem,
interrogating each other. Taken together, the essays challenge
depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and
teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both
familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a
born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the
Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing,
marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and
twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally
wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies,
queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies,
environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to
explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place
are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations
of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies-five
political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for some of the
most provocative new work being done in American literary studies.
Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only for scholars and
students already well grounded in the study of nineteenth-century
American literature and culture, but for anyone, scholar or
student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most vibrant work in
the field. Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie Foote, Matthew
Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo, Caroline Levander,
Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana Luciano, Timothy Marr,
Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo, Mark Storey, Matthew E.
Suazo, and Edward Sugden.
Offers a positive approach to literary criticism At a moment when
the "hermeneutics of suspicion" is under fire in literary studies,
The Practices of Hope encourages an alternative approach that,
rather than abandoning critique altogether, relinquishes its
commitment to disenchantment. As an alternative, Castiglia offers
hopeful reading, a combination of idealism and imagination that
retains its analytic edge yet moves beyond nay-saying to articulate
the values that shape our scholarship and creates the possible
worlds that animate genuine social critique. Drawing on a variety
of critics from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, from
Granville Hicks and Constance Rourke to Lewis Mumford, C.L.R.
James, Charles Feidelson, and Richard Poirier, Castiglia
demonstrates that their criticism simultaneously denounced the
social conditions of the Cold War United States and proposed ideal
worlds as more democratic alternatives. Organized around a series
of terms that have become anathema to critics-nation, liberalism,
humanism, symbolism-The Practices of Hope shows how they were
employed in criticism's "usable past" to generate an alternative
critique, a practice of hope.
Offers a positive approach to literary criticism At a moment when
the "hermeneutics of suspicion" is under fire in literary studies,
The Practices of Hope encourages an alternative approach that,
rather than abandoning critique altogether, relinquishes its
commitment to disenchantment. As an alternative, Castiglia offers
hopeful reading, a combination of idealism and imagination that
retains its analytic edge yet moves beyond nay-saying to articulate
the values that shape our scholarship and creates the possible
worlds that animate genuine social critique. Drawing on a variety
of critics from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, from
Granville Hicks and Constance Rourke to Lewis Mumford, C.L.R.
James, Charles Feidelson, and Richard Poirier, Castiglia
demonstrates that their criticism simultaneously denounced the
social conditions of the Cold War United States and proposed ideal
worlds as more democratic alternatives. Organized around a series
of terms that have become anathema to critics-nation, liberalism,
humanism, symbolism-The Practices of Hope shows how they were
employed in criticism's "usable past" to generate an alternative
critique, a practice of hope.
This is the first major effort in twenty years to reassess the
relationship between Melville and Hawthorne.Herman Melville and
Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an
intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive
tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social
ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical
applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical
studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number
of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities
existing between the two writers.Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S.
Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known
biographical facts of the two writers' relationship and an overview
of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow
broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a
question that ""looms like a grand hooded phantom"" over the field
of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence - Hawthorne's
on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville's on The Blithedale Romance,
to mention only the most obvious instances - are also discussed.
The other topics covered include professional competitiveness;
Melville's search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the
marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism,
transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and
Melville's times.Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical
issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are
informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new
historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities
that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American
culture.
The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and
gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians,
commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual
cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future. But
without memory there can be no future, argue Christopher Castiglia
and Christopher Reed in this exploration of the struggle over gay
memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS.
Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory,
If Memory Serves offers a new perspective on the emergence of
contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of
gay memory. Drawing on a rich archive of videos, films, television
shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the
wake of the epidemic, the authors reveal a resistance among critics
to valuing-even recognizing-the inscription of gay memory in art,
literature, popular culture, and the built environment. Castiglia
and Reed explore such topics as the unacknowledged ways in which
the popular sitcom Will and Grace circulated gay subcultural
references to awaken a desire for belonging among young viewers;
the post-traumatic (un)rememberings of queer theory; and the
generation of "ideality politics" in the art of Felix
Gonzalez-Torres, the film Chuck & Buck, and the independent
video Video Remains. Inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's insight that
"the possession of a historical identity and the possession of a
social identity coincide," Castiglia and Reed demonstrate that
memory is crafted in response to inadequacies in the present-and
therefore a constructive relation to the past is essential to the
imagining of a new future.
Not many people know that Walt Whitman-arguably the preeminent
American poet of the nineteenth century-began his literary career
as a novelist. Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the
Times was his first and only novel. Published in 1842, during a
period of widespread temperance activity, it became Whitman's most
popular work during his lifetime, selling some twenty thousand
copies.The novel tells the rags-to-riches story of Franklin Evans,
an innocent young man from the Long Island countryside who seeks
his fortune in New York City. Corrupted by music halls, theaters,
and above all taverns, he gradually becomes a drunkard. Until the
very end of the tale, Evans's efforts to abstain fail, and each
time he resumes drinking, another series of misadventures ensues.
Along the way, Evans encounters a world of mores and conventions
rapidly changing in response to the vicissitudes of slavery,
investment capital, urban mass culture, and fervent reform.
Although Evans finally signs a temperance pledge, his sobriety
remains haunted by the often contradictory and unsettling changes
in antebellum American culture. The editors' substantial
introduction situates Franklin Evans in relation to Whitman's life
and career, mid-nineteenth-century American print culture, and many
of the developments and institutions the novel depicts, including
urbanization, immigration, slavery, the temperance movement, and
new understandings of class, race, gender, and sexuality. This
edition includes a short temperance story Whitman published at
about the same time as he did Franklin Evans, the surviving
fragment of what appears to be another unfinished temperance novel
by Whitman, and a temperance speech Abraham Lincoln gave the same
year that Franklin Evans was published.
This work provides an analysis of a tradition of American women's
captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from
Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett
Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation
Army. Examining more than 60 accounts by women captives, as well as
novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's 18th-century classic "Rueben
and Rachel" to modern mass-market romances, the author investigates
paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find
freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually
vulnerable and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their
non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird
their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of
captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny,
and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as
all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender
roles and racial ideologies. Whether the women of these stories
resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or
eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the
power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these
compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent
explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have
significant implications for current critical investigations into
the construction of gender, race and nation.
This work provides an analysis of a tradition of American women's
captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from
Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett
Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation
Army. Examining more than 60 accounts by women captives, as well as
novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's 18th-century classic "Rueben
and Rachel" to modern mass-market romances, the author investigates
paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find
freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually
vulnerable and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their
non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird
their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of
captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny,
and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as
all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender
roles and racial ideologies. Whether the women of these stories
resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or
eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the
power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these
compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent
explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have
significant implications for current critical investigations into
the construction of gender, race and nation.
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