This provocative new work explores the Puritan and Protestant roots of American sexual identity and culture.
Offering both historical and interdisciplinary breadth, it charts Protestant influence on the American character from Cotton Mather to Kenneth Starr. From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating insights into American sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

This provocative new work explores the Puritan and Protestant roots of American sexual identity and culture.
Offering both historical and interdisciplinary breadth, it charts Protestant influence on the American character from Cotton Mather to Kenneth Starr. From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating insights into American sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin's "Turkish decade," Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin's life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the United States. Zaborowska demonstrates how Baldwin's Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity and U.S. race relations as the 1960s drew to a close.

Following Baldwin's footsteps through Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum, Zaborowska presents many never published photographs, new information from Turkish archives, and original interviews with Turkish artists and intellectuals who knew Baldwin and collaborated with him on a play that he directed in 1969. She analyzes the effect of his experiences on his novel "Another Country" (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, "The Fire Next Time" (1963) and "No Name in the Street "(1972), and she explains how Baldwin's time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France. "James Baldwin's Turkish Decade" expands the knowledge of Baldwin's role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration.

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971-87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed "Chez Baldwin." In Me and My House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin's home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin.

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971-87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed "Chez Baldwin." In Me and My House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin's home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin.

Until now, the East European canon in American literature has been dominated by male dissident figures such as Brodsky, Milosz, and Kundera. Magdalena Zaborowska challenges that canon by demonstrating the contributions of lesser-known immigrant and expatriate women writers from Poland and Russia: Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Elizabeth Stern, Maria Kuncewicz, and Eva Hoffman. She maintains that gendered readings of their novels and autobiographies help us to realize that immigrant women writers offer a special perspective on what it means to leave a homeland, never to be able to truly return, to come as the 'other' to an alien land, and to undergo the multidimensional experience of finding America. Through close examination of the narrative strategies employed by these women, Zaborowksa demonstrates how their works subvert traditional ways of writing and reading the 'official' rhetoric of the American Dream, which so often suppresses 'unofficial' cultural differences. She constructs the immigrant woman's novel as a truly intercultural genre: one that embraces fiction, autobiography, and documentary; one that reflects a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds; and one that foregrounds issues of canon revision, gender identity, and multiculturalism.
Originally published 1995.
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