bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Free-Lance in the Soul-World”: Toward a Reappraisal of Vachel Lindsay's Works
Authors: Chénetier Marc
Published: April 2011

One hardly thinks of Vachel Lindsay as relevant in our times. Still, once in a while, a voice makes itself heard, talking about him as a poet that matters—somehow. Allen Ginsberg, a good many years ago, pointed to Lindsay's pertinent use of sounds and, although he probably did not make enough of what they had most in common (i.e., their belonging to an emphatically American line of bardic seers and their belief in the prophetic nature of poetry), he pulled Lindsay out of the oblivion he had fallen into among practicing poets. More recently, Jerome Rothenberg, in his introduction to Revolution of the Word, deemed part of his work worth salvaging, “the intermedia work combining poetry with dance, film, hieroglyphics”; and indeed, however restrictive and at times inaccurate this description—Lindsay never “combined poetry with film,” for example, in the strictest sense of the terms—its merit is great for it takes Lindsay out of the worn rut of “evangelistic jazz” and “rhythmic preaching” he had been pushed into by critics as little apt to discern the new and fecund in him as they were eager to corner him into a reputation that served their own purposes. The fact is that Lindsay is far from resembling his by now stereotyped image, and in the following pages I would like to consider enough elements to make more manifest one or two of the most neglected or distorted aspects and purposes of his endeavor.
Myth, History, and Literature in Virgin Land
Authors: Trachtenberg Alan
Published: April 2011

Professional historians will surely agree that the writing of history is itself an act of historical consequence. If history is, as Carl Becker argues, “the artificial extension of the social memory,” and if social identity and behavior depend in part on memory, then created versions of the past are a serious matter. They can have decisive effects on the present. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land is an exemplary form of a creative history which extends, refines, and enlightens social memory. And it does so in a particularly significant way, by pioneering a new area for study, a new territory in the landscape of memory. It is the area of a general cultural consciousness—“the region of culture,” as Leo Marx puts it, “where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination—we may call them ‘cultural symbols’— meet.” Henry Nash Smith himself describes as his aim to trace “the impact of the West, the vacant continent beyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans.” His territory is consciousness in relation to a complex historical actuality, the American West.
“The Citadel Within”: Washington Irving and the Search for Literary Vocation
Authors: Kasson Joy S.
Published: April 2011

From his own time to the present, Washington Irving has seemed to many observers to embody the ambiguities of the American aesthetic response to Europe. The critical success ofThe Sketch Book, published in 1819–20, offered the first important reversal to the one-way flow of culture across the Atlantic. Through the persona of Geoffrey Crayon, genteel, literate observer of Old World customs, Irving offered a convincing argument that an American could be a man of letters, that a “demi-savage” from the New World wilderness could hold “a feather in his hand, instead of on his head.” Yet Irving's very success in conforming to European literary standards left him open to charges of imitativeness and overrefinement; critics complained that his work was too Anglicized and prettified, that he sold his native birthright for the pottage of international acclaim. More recent commentators have attempted to rescue Crayon for American literature, stressing Irving's humor, his incorporation of native materials, and his ties to the landscape. Both sides of the argument, however, tend to focus on Irving as he presented himself at the end of his career, after a quarter-century of elaboration on Geoffrey Crayon. By the time Irving published the Author's Revised Version of his works in 1848, a shelf full of books affirmed his identity as the gentle wanderer, graceful observer, resident of the Alhambra, and spectator at Bracebridge Hall.
The Maneuverings of a Transcendental Mind: Emerson's Essays of 1841
Authors: Leary Lewis
Published: April 2011

Any attempt to explain Emerson inevitably results, to one degree or another, in explaining one's self, for Emerson's purpose was to awaken each person to assurance that the individual is indeed a self, different from but potentially similar to all others. With this in mind, I shall nonetheless attempt through an examination of his first series of essays to challenge the often expressed critical observation that his essays ultimately consist of aptly phrased, eminently quotable aphorisms strung formlessly together, so that his sentences are often better than his paragraphs, his paragraphs superior to the essays that they compose, and his collection—though wondrously inspiring in parts—is, finally, a miscellany. My enterprise is encouraged by Emerson's observation in his journal not many months after the Essays of 1841 appeared: “It is much to write sentences; it is more to add method & write out the subject of your life symmetrically … to arrange many general reflections in their natural order so that I shall have one harmonious piece.” It is the symmetry, the harmonious whole, the natural order, which I seek to discover and reveal.
The Great Debate in Richmond
Authors: Inge M. Thomas
Published: April 2011

After the twelve Southern contributors to the Agrarian manifesto,I'll Take My Stand, had submitted their completed manuscript to Harper's in the late summer of 1930, they eagerly looked forward to the American public's reaction to their book, which theSaturday Reviewwould call “the most challenging book published in the United States since [Henry] George'sProgress and Poverty” and the “most audacious book ever written by Southerners.” In the meantime, they devised plans of a practical sort that might implement their theoretical statement, such as founding a Southern academy that would have a complete philosophical constitution and an organized program of publication to spread Agrarian ideas. The twelve Southerners also considered establishing a Southern magazine associated with a publishing house and a chain of book stores, purchasing and editing a Tennessee county newspaper, securing foundation funds to support their programs, and possibly even developing a political force by either winning Democratic party support, or uniting with Western agricultural interests.
Another Battle of the Books: American Fiction, 1950–1970
Authors: Eisinger Chester E.
Published: April 2011

American fiction in the years from 1950 to 1970 may be read as a continuing dialogue between writers married to a variety of traditional forms and attitudes and writers who embraced a number of avant-garde positions. Often this dialogue grows sharp and shrill, spilling over from works of fiction into manifesto, polemic, or criticism, and the relationship between these two groups looks more like a battle than a dialogue—a new battle of the books. The traditionalists are on the defensive generally, falling back a little querulously on humanistic positions derived from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which yielded a man-centered value system, an empirical epistemology, and a mimetic and teleological aesthetic, all of which seem less certain and more ambiguous than they used to. The modernists, heirs to the movement for which James Joyce may stand as a symbol, are the aggressors, announcing in their proclamations the liquidation of the art of the past and taking a nihilistic attitude toward traditional values and forms, espousing a cult of novelty, conceiving of art as a plaything, and pushing their experimentalism possibly toward self-ruin and silence; in short, behaving like traditional avant-gardists. To understand the terms of this dialogue, or the lines of this battle, is to understand more than the tensions between the two camps and more than the substance and form of the fiction written in each. It is to understand certain major cultural phenomena from which this battle issues and which it illustrates and documents.
Eyewitness to Utopia: Illustrations in Utopian Literature
Authors: Roemer Kenneth M.
Published: April 2011

The relationships between an author's text and an illustrator's images can pose fascinating questions about literature and art and how readers perceive both. This is especially true if the writer happens to be a Utopian author whose work appeared in America during the late nineteenth century when two different traditions combined with some delightfully unusual results.
The Rituals of Humanity and the Rhythms of Reality
Authors: Delattre Roland A.
Published: April 2011

Rhythm—the measured flow of motion—is an essential formative aspect of reality and of our experience, and ritual is among the principal cultural resources by which we grasp and participate in those rhythms and gain some purchase upon them and the energies they embody.
Notes Toward a Reappraisal of Depression Literature
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: April 2011

In a movie directed by Frank Capra toward the end of the Great Depression, an enterprising lady reporter with an eye for the photogenic persuades a down-and-out ballplayer to act the part of “John Doe,” “author” of her new syndicated front-page column, “I Protest!” The speeches that Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) pays the handsome hobo (Gary Cooper) to front are, if slightly sentimental, always provocative and immediately successful. They inveigh against the petty self-interest that in the name of rugged individualism has weakened and corrupted the cause of the common citizen in this country; they plead for a new spirit of grass-roots cooperative activism. “Tear down the fences,” John Doe implores his small-town audiences. “You're the hope of the world!”
John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal: Radical Responses to Roosevelt's “Peaceful Revolution”
Authors: Harrison Helen A.
Published: April 2011

In the early 1930s, a significant number of American artists who were aligned, either practically or theoretically, with the Communist Party became supporters of the New Deal. Artist members of the John Reed Club, a Party-directed cultural organization, were enjoined to develop “revolutionary art” as a vehicle for the type of social change that had transformed tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union. Yet many of them found Roosevelt's “peaceful revolution” worthy of the highest accolade they could bestow on a subject: its inclusion as an affirmative theme in their work. In so viewing it, they ran counter to the Party's stated policy in opposition to socioeconomic reform—a policy that was later reversed to accommodate the New Deal and thus vindicate the artists's position. From its inception, the New Deal seemed to offer artists an attractive alternative to the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions predicted by Marx and promulgated by the Communists.
Images of the Past: Popular Culture and Postwar America
Authors: Pells Richard H.
Published: April 2011

The Difficulty of using popular culture as a way of understanding historical periods is no secret. Historians themselves have long been reluctant to study the impact of the mass media because it does not seem to yield the sorts of “hard” evidence presumably found in political debates, social legislation, state department memoranda, statistics on production and trade, tax records, or movements of population. All of these source materials persuade the historian that he can discover what people actually thought and did, whereas it seems almost impossible to detect what effects, if any, popular culture has had on the attitudes and behavior of its audience.
Trimalchio in West Egg: The Great Gatsby Onstage
Authors: Morsberger Robert E.
Published: April 2011

In the Nineteenth Century, it was common practice for popular novels to be adapted to the theater. In the absence of any distinguished playwrights in English between Sheridan and Shaw, the novel was the most flourishing middle-class literary entertainment, and the theater-going public found compensation for the dearth of original drama by seeing their favorite fictional characters on stage. Novels by Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain were dramatized with varying degrees of success, together with plays from such popular favorites as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Under Two Flags, Ben-Hur, The Prisoner of Zenda, If I Were King, and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.
Beauty Bare: William Bartram and His Triangulated Wilderness
Authors: Seelye John
Published: April 2011

In september 1753 the American botanist John Bartram set out with his young son Billy from their farm on the banks of the Schuylkill for the Catskill Mountains for the purpose of gathering seeds and plant samples. The journey ended at the Hudson Valley home of Cadwallader Colden, surveyor-general of New York and himself a botanist of note, where the Bartrams made the acquaintance of yet another botanist, Alexander Garden of Charleston, South Carolina. The elder Bartram encouraged Garden to open correspondence with Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist to whom Bartram had been writing for years, correspondence that gives particular point to this triangular meeting on the banks of the Hudson. For the Bartrams' journey and their visit with the other two botanists may be said to epitomize the scientific Enlightenment in colonial America, an intellectual voluntarism that had as its political counterpart a formal gathering of regional representatives in nearby Albany the year following. That convention, necessitated by the hostilities soon to erupt as the French and Indian War, produced a prototype of the Constitution, and the impromptu congress that met at “Coldenhamia” in 1753, though animated by pacific purposes, was likewise a manifestation of federated and protonational design.
Thomas Hart Benton'sBoomtown:Regionalism Redefined
Authors: Marling Karal Ann
Published: April 2011

In february 1927, Thomas Hart Benton visited Borger, Texas. In 1928 Benton paintedBoomtoum(oil on canvas, 45 by 54 inches. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; Marion Stratton Gould Fund) from sketches made in Borger.Boomtownwas, by the artist's retrospective admission, a milestone in his career; he called it “one of my best paintings” and “one of my best-known ‘Regionalist’ pictures.”
Defining American Jewish Ethnicity
Authors: Moore Deborah Dash
Published: April 2011

The Child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, American Jewish ethnicity grew from a complex synthesis of Jewish immigrant and American urban life. As the historian Timothy Smith observes, “That this nation's ethnic groups, viewed structurally, were made in America by voluntary association of newcomers has long been evident.” Yet nineteenth-century German Jewish immigrants to the United States, who pioneered in developing ethnic Jewish fraternal associations, elaborated a religious definition of Jewish group identity. American Jewish ethnicity as an ideology and social reality defining Jewish group life in the United States emerged in the years preceding World War II, when a native-born generation of Jews came of age. These second-generation Jews were descendants of the massive Eastern European immigration of 1880–1920, which peaked in 1906. Seeking to become fully American, second-generation Jews climbed out of lower-class jobs and poor immigrant neighborhoods. Norman Podhoretz, who moved from a lower-class section of New York City to an upper-middle-class one, writes that “one of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan — or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”
Mail-Order Catalogs as Resources in American Culture Studies
Authors: Schlereth Thomas J.
Published: April 2011

“There's a Haynes-Cooper catalog in every farmer's kitchen,” remarks a Wisconsin woman inFanny Herself, Edna Ferber's 1917 novel depicting the Chicago mail-order industry. “The Bible's in the parlor, but they keep the H.C. book in the room where they live.” Harry Crews, in his 1978 autobiography of his boyhood in Bacon County, Georgia, recalls a similar centrality accorded the secular “Big Book” or “Farmer's Bible” in his family's tenant-farmer shanty. The highest form of entertainment for him was to thumb through the Sears, Roebuck catalog with his black friend Willalee and make up fantasies about the models on the book's pages. Writes Crews, “Without that catalog our childhood would have been radically different. The federal government ought to strike a medal for Sears, Roebuck Company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people.”
William Carlos Williams and the Efficient Moment
Authors: Tichi Cecelia
Published: April 2011

In the face of William Carlos Williams's achievement in Spring and All (1923), In the American Grain (1925), Paterson (1946–58), and The Desert Music (1954), among other acclaimed works, readers must find it inconceivable that the young and poetically misguided Williams could have continued to labor at the genteel verse of his medical-school and interning years (1906–9). When a growing number of distinguished critics find Williams's place in twentieth-century poetics to be “revolutionary,” it seems pointless even to imagine the young Williams perennially separating his life from his vague “ideals” of beauty and ethical purpose, and thus going on to become, in maturity, another Joyce Kilmer. To date, scholars of Williams's early work, especially James Breslin and Rod Townley, have revealed the psychological change by which Williams's repressed self became free “to re-enact fully the process of release and reformation that Whitman had started” and have shown, as well, that between 1909 and 1919 Williams underwent an “agonizing process of cultural divestment” as he gradually shed his belief that poetry was a sacred trust of moral idealism and noble purposes couched in truth and beauty. Sloughing off his post-Victorian ways, and immersed in the responsibilities of marriage, mortgage, parenthood, and medical practice, Williams seems inevitably to have been prepared to “weld his artistic and psychological allegiance to the cult of experience.”
Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; or, Gothic Castles in the New Republic
Authors: Davidson Cathy N.
Published: April 2011

Despite its European provenance in a romantic revitalization of surviving vestiges of the medieval past, the gothic novel has a long and honorable New World history. It was one of the first fictional forms borrowed from the burgeoning eighteenth-century English novel. Along with a few other newly transplanted varieties of fiction—for example, the sentimental novel, the picaresque adventure, and the travel narrative—it also thrived in the newly independent Republic. That first flourishing is attested to by such noteworthy early American Gothics as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811)—the former one of the best novels of the period, the latter one of the most popular. The form then reached what was surely an artistic apogee when, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne labored in its haunted gardens. This full flowering has in our time become, to alter the metaphor, a flood. In drugstore and supermarket, wherever inexpensive paperbacks are sold, book racks abound with almost identical volumes, their “covers featuring … gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns.” Clearly, Americans still have an affinity for castles in literature, particularly if those castles ominously loom over young, beautiful, vulnerable heroines.
From “American Studies” to “American Culture Studies”: A Dialogue Across Generations
Authors: Wise Gene
Published: April 2011

The symbol-myth-image generation of American Studies scholars went to school to giants, and in vital respects were giants themselves. They were tutored by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Ralph Henry Gabriel, Samuel Eliot Morison, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Howard Mumford Jones, and they went on to create such classics in the field as Virgin Land; The Savages of America; Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age; The American Adam; The Jacksonian Persuasion; The Quest for Paradise; The Machine in the Garden.
A Poetics of the American Idea: The Jewish Writer and America
Authors: Girgus Sam B.
Published: April 2011

The history of the Jews in America is to a considerable extent the history of an idea. It is the story of how Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America and how, in turn, Jewish writers, intellectuals, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea. While it altered the modern Jewish experience, Jewish thinkers often led in the effort to make the idea of America relevant to the needs of an urban, industrial, and even postindustrial age. The work of such writers and thinkers served to keep the American idea meaningful in a time of competing authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies.
The Instability of Belief inThe Blithedale Romance
Authors: McIntosh James
Published: April 2011

Toward the end ofThe Blithedale Romance, Miles Coverdale tells the A reader that he has borne the spectacle of Zenobia's death in his memory “for more than twelve long years” (p. 235). If, fancifully, we posit that his stay at Blithedale coincides in historical time with Hawthorne's stay at Brook Farm, this makes the year of the action of the novel 1841, and the year of its narration 1853, or later. Because the book was published in 1852, I would suggest that Hawthorne was projecting in his narrative not merely a contemporary state of mind but an ominously prophetic one. For I shall argue that Coverdale's mind is afflicted with a malaise closely related to the social disintegration he sees around him; thatThe Blithedale Romanceis a willfully present-minded book; and that in it Hawthorne is preoccupied not just with Brook Farm but also with the inner afflictions of a newly fragmented New England society and, beyond that, with what Coverdale calls the “whole chaos of human struggle” (p. 246).
The Sin of Art and the Problem of American Realism: William Dean Howells
Authors: Bell Michael Davitt
Published: April 2011

Warner berthoff begins The Ferment of Realism (1965), his study of American literature from 1884 to 1919, with a succinct restatement of an idea long accepted by literary critics: “The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of ‘realism’ as the dominant standard of value.” This is the customary interpretation of the American literary generation that included William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James; indeed, these men viewed their own historical importance in much the same terms. Thus James, in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, condescended toward the “absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion.” Twain's novels are laced with attacks, launched supposedly in the name of “realism,” against “romance” and the “romantic,” which is also the serious point behind the humor of such essays as “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” And Howells, in the 1880s, emerged as the most overt American spokesman for the new standard of “realism.” “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” he demanded in Criticism and Fiction (1891); “let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires.” Twentieth-century literary historians have for the most part been content to accept and perpetuate these claims; they have told us again and again that in the works of our best fiction writers after the Civil War, American “romanticism” gave way to American “realism.”
The Honeymoon Trail to Niagara Falls
Authors: McKinsey Elizabeth
Published: April 2011

By the time oscar wilde made his American tour in 1882, the honeymoon tradition at Niagara was firmly established. Perhaps we are as cynical about honeymoons at the Falls as Wilde; by now the idea is a thorough cliche. Yet the custom has had a remarkably long life, reaching its widest vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, and even today it is not completely defunct: Young couples still “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and the Falls. In the late nineteenth century the association of the Falls with the wedding journey was promoted by hotel advertisements and railroad excursion pitches – a product of commercial “hype” much like the modern Poconos honeymoon. But the origin of the Niagara honeymoon seems to antedate such promotion by several decades, although it is difficult to pinpoint. Both its elusive origins and its remarkable persistence suggest a deep-seated imaginative attraction that Niagara has held for newlyweds.
Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural History of American Advertising, 1880–1930
Authors: Lears T. J. Jackson
Published: April 2011

In older downtowns the casual observer's eye can still be arrested by spectral presences from the commercial past. Where space is available on brick or stone, ancient advertising murals preside over parking lots, littered playgrounds, construction projects. Often only faintly discernible amid banks and fast-food franchises, some announce products – Uneeda Biscuit, Wilson's Whiskey; some are populated by fading fantastic characters – the Gold Dust twins, the White Rock girl. Once-banal adjuncts of everyday life, they exert more fascination as they recede from view.
Styron's Sophie's Choice, Jews and Other Marginals, and the Mainstream
Authors: Chametzky Jules
Published: April 2011

Originally the paper on which this article is based was entitled “The Cultural Politics of Southern and Jewish Writers” — which is a fine title and subject but, of course, much too broad, requiring book-length treatment for adequate development. If I were to write such a book, I would be concerned with the energies and strategies used by key writers representative of these groups (concerns I would consider paradigmatic for regional, ethnic, and other “marginal” phenomena in American culture) as they launched an assault on, infiltrated, charmed, or recast the mold and idea of the national literature.
The One and the Many: Comments on the Essays by Jules Chametzky and Werner Sollors
Authors: Baldwin David
Published: April 2011

The essays by chametzky and sollors present a sufficient challenge to one barely initiated into the mysteries of regionalism and ethnicity, who spends his time with the standard texts of American literature. So it goes in American Studies. What I may do by way of contribution is not to present some alternate ideas, which would be foolish, but to explicate for purposes of possible clarification and debate those presented in the two essays. As the two concern themselves with quite different aspects of the general topic, each will be given separate treatment.
American Popular Culture and High Culture in a Changing Class Structure
Authors: Gans Herbert J.
Published: April 2011

America's leisure-time activities — artistic, entertaining, inlorma-tional and other — have usually been divided into elite and mass components, high culture and popular culture. However, because sociologists aim, among other things, to connect people's behavior with their social and economic origins, and because leisure-time culture is in part a reflection and an effect of class, a sociologically more accurate analysis calls for a set of cultural strata or subcultures that parallel class strata. I proposed such cultural strata in an earlier study; the purpose of this paper is to update the previous analysis. After raising some conceptual issues, I want to describe recent changes in the American class structure and therefore in American culture, concluding with some comments on the relationships between culture and class.
Dom, Namai, Heim: Images of the New Immigrant's Home
Authors: Szuberla Guy A.
Published: April 2011

Saul bellow, in Humboldt's Gift, extends Chicago's present imaginatively back to its immigrant past. Through the mediating vision of Charlie Citrine, he remembers an old neighborhood's “Polish days” when its “small brick bungalows were painted fresh red, maroon, and candy green.” “I always thought,” Citrine says in calling up this vision of things past, that “there must be Baltic towns that looked like this, Gdynia for instance.” Nearly a century before Bellow's novel, the same commingling of places—and almost the same sense of transplanted homes and communities — seized the imagination of the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz. Looking at homes in an immigrant section of Chicago and reading the Polish inscriptions and names on the houses, “it seemed,” Sienkiewicz said, “as though I were in Poland.” Bellow's and Sienkiewicz's doubled visions of place, their sense of Europe and America transposed and telescoped, turn on the lingering ambiguities of the new immigrant's experience—the paradoxical act of finding and losing home and identity in America.
The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism
Authors: Buell Lawrence
Published: April 2011

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.
The Federal Mother: Whitman as Revolutionary Son
Authors: Erkkila Betsy
Published: April 2011

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin remarked on the radiant sun painted on the back of George Washington's chair: “I have,” he said, “often and often in the course of the Session … looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” In one of his earliest published poems, “The Columbian's Song,” Whitman draws upon the rising-glory rhetoric of the Revolutionary period to express a similar confidence in America's future:

O, my soul is drunk with joy,

And my inmost heart is glad,

To think my country's star will not

Through endless ages fade,

That on its upward glorious course

Our red eyed eagle leaps,

…………

That here at length is found

A wide extending shore,

Where Freedom's starry gleam

Shines with unvarying beam.
An Unpublished Chapter from An American Tragedy
Authors: Dreiser Theodore
Published: April 2011

This chapter in the manuscript, with some others which were later condensed into the first chapter of the published novel, presents an excellent and bewildering example of the problem in editing Dreiser's manuscripts.
Mr. Audubon and Mr. Bien: An Early Phase in the History of American Chromolithography
Authors: Marzio Peter C.
Published: April 2011

The term “chromo,” a nickname for chromolithography, has come to be synonymous with anything that is “fake” or “cheap” or “false.” The period in America when chromolithography served as a popular technology for reproducing the likenesses of oil paintings and water colors was also the time of the Gilded Age, those decades between the Civil War and the start of the twentieth century, which opened with the scandals of the Grant administration and closed with America's needless involvement in a war with Spain. Historians have written of the cultural backsliding during these years as a retreat from the hey day of the New England writers of 1830–1860 and from the first generation of Hudson River painters. According to conventional wisdom, it was a time of Victorian excess in all the arts of design. It was a time when appearance, not fact or truth, held center stage. It was the time of the “chromo civilization,” as it is called.
Music in the Twenties: The Jean Goldkette Orchestra
Authors: Nye Russel B.
Published: April 2011

Only the enthusiast of popular music is likely, these days, to remember the name of Jean Goldkette, and only the few who are familiar with the music of the twenties recognize the importance of his Jean Goldkette Victor Recording Orchestra of 1926–27, the first large swinging dance band. It was this band of which Rex Stewart, who heard it at its first New York opening, wrote, “It was, without any question, the greatest in the world … the original predecessor to any large white dance Orchestra that followed, up to Benny Goodman.” “Even Goodman,” Stewart continued, “did not come close to the tremendous sound of Goldkette….” This is, of course, high praise from one who was himself part of a great musical organization, Fletcher Henderson's, and later of Ellington's. Yet if one listens to their records and assembles the comments made by those who, like Stewart, worked the same clubs and played the same jobs, one tends to agree with latter-day critic Brian Rust, who in speaking of the era called the Goldkette Victor outfit “the greatest band of them all.” It is time, no doubt, that the place of this group and of the organization that Goldkette developed was established in the historical stream of American popular music.
The Martyrdom of General George Armstrong Custer, U.S.A
Authors: Rosenberg Bruce A.
Published: April 2011

Dime novelist Frederick Whittaker first met George Armstrong Custer in the New York offices of Galaxy magazine, for whom the general was writing a series of articles (later collected as My Life on the Plains). Whittaker had served honorably and well in the Civil War himself; yet despite a serious chest wound received in the Wilderness, his zest for martial glory and his admiration for the glorious had not diminished. He immediately became “The Boy General's” ardent admirer and, after the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, was his fallen hero's most ardent apologist. Within two weeks of the first news of the battle, Whittaker had published eighty lines of creditable doggerel in the Army and Navy Journal—“Custer's Last Charge”; a eulogy in Galaxy appeared shortly afterward (in which he compared “The Yellow Hair,” favorably, to Don John of Austria, the Black Prince, Alexander the Great; Custer was as much the beau sabreur as Murat, as brilliant as Seidlitz; he charged like Murat and died like Leonidas); and then the Grand Finale, a six-hundred-plus page biography, The Life of General George A. Custer, written and put into print within six months of Custer's death. As a writer for Beadle and Adams, Whittaker had learned how to roll out his prose with steam press rapidity; but the tone, the fullness of the narrative, and the ardor which blushes every page show that these various works were de amore.
Where Honor is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man
Authors: Moses Wilson J.
Published: April 2011

Frederick Douglass may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.
The Labor of Seeing: Pragmatism, Ideology, and Gender in Winslow Homer'sThe Morning Bell
Authors: Wolf Bryan J.
Published: April 2011

I wish to tell two stories here. The first, the briefer one, centers on the opening pages of William James's “The Sentiment of Rationality,” a seminal piece that helped launch James in the direction of pragmatism. The second, the bulk of the essay, focuses on a painting by Winslow Homer,The Morning Bell(ca. 1872, Figure 1), an early work that brings together Homer's interests in working-class figures, bucolic settings, and popular culture. There is little at first glance to link these two stories. While James proceeds to reinvent the notion of rationality, lending it an instrumental inflection that fits it for work in a postmetaphysical world, Homer conjures up images of rural New England for an audience still troubled by memories of the Civil War. Neither the subject of each work, nor their respective media, nor even their intended audiences, bear much in common.
New Deal Politics and Regionalist Art: Thomas Hart Benton's A Social History of the State of Indiana
Authors: Doss Erika
Published: April 2011

The past two decades have seen a plethora of new information on American artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975). Matthew Baigell pioneered Benton studies with his monograph on the artist in 1974, and Karal Ann Marling enhanced the subject with her survey of the artist's drawings in 1985. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City developed and traveled an extensive show of Benton's paintings in the late 1980s and produced an extensive biography by curator Henry Adams. The centennial of Benton's birth generated even more material: exhibits of his prints and drawings, volumes of essays on his art and character, and a considerable number of magazine and journal articles assessing his importance in 20thcentury American culture. Even Prospects has done its part for Bentonia with essays by Marling (1981) and Barbara Ladner (1990).
The Voice of Paranoia: Norman Mailer'sThe Executioner's Song
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: April 2011

The facts are these: some time on the early morning of July 20, 1976, Gary Gilmore, barely three months after his release from a twelveyear sentence for armed robbery served in the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, drove into a gas station in Provo, Utah, robbed Max Jensen, the station attendant, and demanded that he lie facedown on the ground. Gilmore then fired twice into Jensen's head at point-blank range with an automatic pistol; Jensen died immediately. In the evening, fourteen or fifteen hours after the first murder, Gilmore drove into a motel situated next door to the house of his relatives, Vern and Ida Damico, who had given Gilmore refuge and found him a job upon his release from prison. Gilmore demanded money from Benny Bushnell, the owner of the motel, asked him to lie face-down on the floor, and then pumped one bullet into his head; Gilmore had intended to shoot him twice, but his gun jammed, and it was several hours before Bushnell would die of his wounds. One day later, Gilmore was arrested for the murder of Benny Bushnell. He was tried and found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death: his choice of death was by firing squad. Though his mother and the American Civil Liberties Union attempted to block the execution, Gilmore demanded that the state of Utah carry out the sentence. On January 17, 1977, he was shot to death by a team of four handpicked riflemen, in the first public execution to have taken place in the United States in over a decade.
Educating the “Immortal Pupil”: Emerson's Identity Politics and the Question of Freedom in the Age of Reform
Authors: Knadler Stephen P.
Published: April 2011

An Emersonian notion of originality and autonomy has over the last century and a half evolved into an enduring part of our cultural heritage. In a nation fractured by racial or class barriers, this assertive individualism continues for many to hold forth the hope of a fundamental principle overlapping our cultural divisions. Of course, this self-reliance has not gone unquestioned in an age of postmodern skepticism. If once a defiance of history and society seemed the American Adam's heroic gesture, recent critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Donald Pease have pointed out the Emersonian self s inescapable ties to the overdeterminate world of discourse. Not only have recent critics dismissed the plausibility of Emerson's idealism, they have disavowed its ideology of solipsistic independence that repudiates collective life. What I would like to do is to pose the problem of Emersonian individualism differently, to frame the terms of the debate less according to false oppositions between authenticity and culture, self and society, or freedom or fate, than in terms of complex negotiations about social authority undertaken in response to the “age of reform's” blurring of traditional distinctions between the public and private. In the second quarter of the 19th Century, the push toward state-sponsored education, specifically, was refiguring power in terms of socialization. Within his essays, Emerson acknowledges that identity is, and could only be, a social construct. Rather than trying to elude the fate of circumstances, Emerson, it might better be argued, attempts to redefine the nature and limitations of freedom in a world where, as he says in his lecture on “Culture” (March, 1851), “education” has superseded politics.
Chicago, Race, and the Rhetoric of the 1919 Riot
Authors: Doreski C. K.
Published: April 2011

By 1919, racial and class tensions coupled with the burden of post-Great War anxiety proved too heavy for many American cities to bear. In Chicago, a carefully engineered, though rigid, vision of city planning, which involved calculated racial and ethnic segregation, became an ad hoc reaction against change. As the city convulsed with demands made by new constituencies, as recent Southern migrants were pitted against more established immigrants and the old neighborhood boundaries failed to contain or restrain the burgeoning new populations, Chicago in the summer of 1919 erupted into racial conflict.
American Exceptionalism and the Naturalization of “America”
Authors: de Sousa Santos Maria Irene Ramalho
Published: April 2011

American exceptionalism, Joyce Appleby has recently reminded us, is “America's peculiar form of Eurocentrism.” Now that the multicultural history of the United States is finally being written, nothing would justify another look at American exceptionalism, except perhaps the need to examine the intellectual ways that have hidden American historical and social diversity for so long. In this essay I basically argue that a certain appropriation of the 18th-Century conception of nature as “what is” played a role also in the development of American exceptionalism. The naturalist rhetoric in American discourse in the 19th Century, I further argue, ran parallel to the most savage depredations of nature ever performed by humankind. I am particularly interested in foregrounding the discrepancy between the steady construction of that greatest of modern artifacts, the American nation, and its concomitant self-justification as a thing of nature. The other side of the commodification of America is its naturalization, an idea that I find is supported, whether critically or uncritically, by many American poets and artists. In recent times we have witnessed a number of ecological attempts at the social recovery of nature in the most advanced capitalist countries, including, of course, the United States. I am not concerned here with these developments, of which ecofeminism is arguably one of the most interesting ones.
Feeling Universality and Thinking Particularistically: Alain Locke, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, and the Harlem Renaissance
Authors: Helbling Mark
Published: April 2011

In 1925 in The New Negro, Alain Locke announced to the world that something new, “something beyond the watch and guard of statistics,” had taken place in the racial alembic of 20th-century America. Although the “Sociologist,” the “Philanthropist,” and the “Race-leader” were not unaware of this “changeling,” this New Negro, they were unable to account for what they saw. A new awareness was needed, for these authorities were unable to see beyond the limits and assumptions of their professional interests. For this reason, it was Locke's intent, as a professor of philosophy at Howard University, to announce, to identify, and to help bring to life this renaissance of the spirit. Not unlike W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, Locke challenged his generation to see the world with fresh eyes. But, whereas DuBois took his reader to the South, to “historic ground,” Locke looked over the terrain of a “younger generation … vibrant with a new psychology.” Harlem, not Georgia, was the center of his attention. And, unlike DuBois, Locke did not seek to reveal “the strange experience” of being a “problem” but celebrated the pride of being black in America.
Rewriting the Indian Tale: Science, Politics, and the Evolution of Ann S. Stephens's Indian Romances
Authors: Gemme Paola
Published: April 2011

On June 9, 1860, the publishing firm of Irving P. Beadle and Company announced in theNew York Daily Tribunethe publication of their first dime novel, Ann S. Stephens'sMalaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter. The narrative was advertised as “the best story of the day,” and its writer as “the star of American authors.” Stephens, whose name is familiar today only to scholars of the dime novel, was indeed well known to the reading public around the mid-19th Century. She was on the editorial board of several magazines, including the illustriousGraham's Magazine. She had published her own journal,Mrs. Stephens Illustrated New Monthly. And she wrote for a plethora of popular magazines, among others theColumbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, theLadies' Wreath, Frank Leslie's Ladies' Gazette of Fashion, andPeterson's Magazine. Her 1854 urban melodramaFashion and Faminehad to be printed three times during the first month of publication to satisfy the demand of the public, and eventlually sold a record eighty thousand copies. Her historical novels, generally of European setting, were so successful that they were systematically printed in book form by the Philadelphia publisher T. B. Peterson after they had appeared serially in Charles J. Peterson's literary monthly. And Stephens had the sanction of the critics as well as the public: already in 1848 theAmerican Literary Magazinehad eulogized her by stating that “of the numerous female writers of our country, Mrs. Stephens is deservedly classed among the first.” Charles J. Peterson had declared in the pages ofGraham's Magazinethat “no writer, since Sir Walter Scott, had excelled her in … power of description.” And even Edgar Allan Poe had acknowledged that Stephens could “seize adroitly on salient incidents and present them with vividness to the eye,” was “not unskillful in delineation of character,” and could, in conclusion, be granted “the effervescence of high talent, if not exactly of genius.”