bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Sinclair Lewis and the Diagnostic Novel: Main Street and Babbitt
Authors: Fisher Joel 
Published: January 2009

Sinclair Lewis's critical reputation could not easily be lower than it is at present. In the discussion that follows I want to suggest that a radical re-evaluation of this reputation, and of Lewis's achievement as a novelist, is necessary; not just because he ought to be read and studied seriously in his own right, but also because in his best fiction he addresses very important issues of narrative technique and of historical and structural analysis. And I believe that without a proper understanding of Lewis's engagement with his material in these areas, most notably in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), the two texts I want to concentrate on here, any account of the re-shaping of American fiction in the years after the First World War must be seriously incomplete.Lewis has proved to be an extremely easy writer to dismiss from any literary or intellectual canon, and not without good reason. His fictions are direct, accessible, and for the most part actively simple. Like Wells and Bennett in England he is a provincial writer of materialist romances, apparently left behind by Modernism; like Upton Sinclair he is a clumsy and over-productive fictionaliser of obvious social problems; in the 1920s he is a man of middle age writing stories about middle-aged characters for a middle-aged readership in a literary and intellectual climate obsessed and characterized by youth; he is a “wildly inconsistent writer, who in his weakest work unquestionably justifies Schorer's description of him as “one of the worst writers in modern American Literature.” And probably more than any other twentieth-century writer of comparable stature, Lewis has been a victim of literary history-writing. With only the very weak platform of spectacular popular success to support him, he stands as the clearest (and unfortunately also the most vociferous) representative of the American fiction that Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their apologists were careful to be seen to be superseding in the 1920s and 1930s.
‘ The Persuasive Lips ’: Men and Guns in America, the West
Authors: Mottram Eric 
Published: January 2009

In June 1974, Tim Findley reported the shoot-out between Los Angeles police and the Symbionese Liberation Army for Rolling Stone. Fully covered by TV, police fanaticism and the fantasies of Cinque entered every home:People sat in their living rooms, watching an epic battle of American insanity, commenting to each other about the cases of ammunition being unloaded from the FBI car, about the small grin on the cop's face as he threw the bolt home on his rifle before firing another round into the blazing little bungalow in south Los Angeles. His base-ball cap and clumsy flak jacket along with his bolt-action rifle made him appear as a boy playing at a game in which all the battles are heroic spectacles – where just the imaginary bad guys fall dead.The camera pans closer …
Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Passing of the Great Race
Authors: Gidley M. 
Published: January 2009

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is slightly taken aback by some of his host's remarks in the course of an otherwise bantering conversation during his first visit to the Buchanans' East Egg residence:‘Civilization's going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things … The idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and … And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?
What Really Happened to Warren Winslow?
Authors: Fender Stephen 
Published: January 2009

Robert Lowell's The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is dedicated to ‘Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea’. Academic treatments of the poem point out that Winslow, Lowell's cousin, was killed in action at sea in World War II, though as to the more specific details of his death there is little agreement among the scholarly commentators. Here are four versions, in the order of their appearance in print:During World War II, the naval vessel on which Lowell's cousin, Warren Winslow, was serving disappeared and no Ishmael survived to explain her fate.
The Black Culture Movement and the Black Community
Authors: Runcie John 
Published: January 2009

The problem of defining a coherent cultural identity is one that has confronted generations of Afro-Americans. As part of the justification and defence of slavery and the slave trade many whites rationalized their actions by arguing that all Africans were cultureless savages. The same combination of guilt and arrogance induced them to attempt to suppress and denigrate surviving elements of a culture whose very existence they had already denied. Most black Americans responded to these pressures by rejecting Africa and their African heritage as a source of shame and by trying to deny and to erase their blackness. Malcom X clearly understood this when he proclaimed in 1965: ‘ We have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our black heads, we hated the shape of our noses …, we hated the color of our skin.’ Identification with the dominant white culture took many forms. For some Blacks it involved the use of hair straightening and skin bleaching; for others it meant the elimination of any ethnic quality in their speech, dress, cuisine and religion; for many more it meant a life of morality and hard work lived according to the dictates of the Puritan ethic. The loss of any distinctive cultural identity involved in this process was made worse by the unwillingness of white society to recognize and accept the Afro-American as part of the dominant culture. In these circumstances many blacks found themselves in a cultural limbo without an adequate self-image. White domination of the media meant that they sometimes felt literally invisible. James Baldwin drew attention to this dilemma in a speech delivered in June 1963, when he noted that:A black child born in this country … discovers two terrifying things. First of all he discovers that he does not exits in it, no matter where he looks – by which I mean books, magazines, movies – there is no reflection of himself anywhere … [if] he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage, or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization.
Evangelicals, Whigs and the Election of William Henry Harrison
Authors: Carwardine Richard 
Published: January 2009

Few American presidential elections have engaged the passions of contemporaries or exercised the imaginations of later generations more than the ‘log cabin’ campaign of 1840. By their parades, slogans, symbols and songs party managers deliberately played down questions of public policy likely to divide their ranks, reasoned discussion was overwhelmed by an organized torrent of feeling, and the carefully cultivated images of candidates obscured the reality of their outlooks. Unscrupulous propagandists, especially of the Whig party, undoubtedly manipulated the emotions of the electorate. The excitement carried a massive 80·2 per cent of voters to the polls, a huge increase in turnout over previous presidential elections and a level of participation exceeded in no subsequent campaign. William Henry Harrison was indeed, as Philip Hone put it, ‘sung into the Presidency’Yet style alone did not create the passion. The economic distress consequent upon the Panic of 1837 allowed the Whigs to act as a focus for those who blamed the Democrats for the hard times and who looked for a more vigorous stimulus to capitalist development than Martin Van Buren was likely to provide.
Robert Frosts
Authors: Crawford Robert 
Published: January 2009

Chicken-farmer, shoe-worker, bobbin-boy, messenger, teacher, journalist, leather-worker, poet, student, cultural ambassador, berry-picker, lecturer. Such a list does not even exhaust Robert Frost's occupations, let alone his ambitions. In fact, when he writes in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” thatMy object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sightit is tempting to see here a sly joke at his own expense. For Frost had so many vocations and avocations that they are well-nigh impossible to combine in any clear-sighted unity. “No poet in this century has written more poems involving more different kinds of work than Frost,” writes William H. Pritchard, before going on to list some of the jobs which Frost found and abandoned between 1885 and 1892. Even the many jobs he did do were insufficient to content him. “I should have been an archaeologist,” he wrote to A. J. Armstrong in 1943 and though Frost as an extremely successful poet might allow himself that ironic wistfulness, he was not being merely whimsical. If some of his family were drawn into the darker sides of his poetry, then they also enacted a few of his brighter dreams. Welcoming Willard E. Fraser as a new son-in-law in 1932, Frost proposes not one but four desired careers.
Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Reappraisal
Authors: Thompson J. A. 
Published: January 2009

Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to leave the Western Hemisphere during his period of office, and, as befitted him, the circumstances in which he did so were neither casual nor frivolous. He went to Europe in late 1918 to take part in the peace conference following a war that the United States had played a crucial part in bringing to a decisive end. His aim was to secure a peace that accorded with the proposals he had set out in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 and in other speeches — a peace that would be based upon justice and thus secure consent, that would embody liberal principles(the self-determination of peoples as far as practicable, the prohibition of discriminatory trade barriers), and that would be maintained by a new international organization in which the United States, breaking its tradition of isolation, would take part — a league of nations that would provide a general guarantee of “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”The symbolism of this dramatic moment, with the American prophet coming to bring redemption to the Old World, imprinted on the minds of contemporaries an image of Wilson which has affected most subsequent historiography. Viewing events from Vienna, that special victim of the First World War, Sigmund Freud found “the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, from the first unsympathetic, and… this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.”
Sir Walter Scott, the Angel of Hadley, and American Historical Fiction
Authors: Dekker George 
Published: January 2009

From 1815 until about 1840 Sir Walter Scott was America's favorite novelist and much the most important model for her own budding fictionalists – Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Simms, Kennedy, Hawthorne, and others. Yet although fairly accurate estimates of Scott's American sales and circulation have been available for several decades, our understanding of his impact on American fiction has made only modest advances since the 1930s. While echoes of the Waverley novels can be discovered everywhere in American Romantic fiction, usually the louder they sound the more they signal merely the borrower's failure of inspiration or nerve. Scott's example was most fruitful where it was comparatively unobtrusive – partly because the best writers were best able thoroughly to adapt Scott's European scenes, characters, and conflicts to American experience, but also because at its best Scott's influence was of the self-effacing kind that helped Cooper, Hawthorne, and their contemporaries find their own true bent as American writers.On one occasion, however, Scott provoked a more revealing response by invading American home territory.
Walter Abish's Fictions: Perfect Unfamiliarity, Familiar Imperfection
Authors: Martin Richard 
Published: January 2009

Writing somewhat sceptically of “recent experimental fiction” in 1975, Morris Dickstein saw a great deal of it as “ebulliently parricidal and cannibalistic,” but detected at the same time “the celebrated ‘cool’ tone…, a cleanness of manner that partly redeems the pervasive irony and emotional distance.” In the case of Walter Abish, the “hot” is the high-spirited inventiveness which grows out of the self-set limitations of a predetermined system; it is part of his own response to the craft of writing: “I was crossing the parade ground in Ramle during my second year in the Tank Corps when quite suddenly the idea of becoming a writer flashed through my mind. A moment of pure exhilaration.”Abish, who was born in Vienna in 1931, spent the formative years of childhood and adolescence in Shanghai, then eight years in Israel, and finally settled in New York City, where in 1960 he became an American citizen. In his writing (a collection of poems, two novels, and two books of short fiction) he has retained an affinity for things European and for the literature of the German-speaking world.
Between the Lines of Billy Budd
Authors: Redfern W. D. 
Published: January 2009

Melville thinks he does, though he cannot speak quite so confidently of the rest of us. The Navy of Billy Budd is a heterocosm, a separate, self-contained and self-regulating world. The tale of the doomed, angelic foretopman begins with a swaggering parade. Billy enjoys his local triumph, to be followed in due course by his tragedy and his partly victorious aftermath. Neither he nor his black counterpart in the opening pages belongs to the nautical tradition of “Billy-be-Damn” (no doubt a more decorous avatar of Bollicky Bill). Their twin asexual cocksureness receives apparently sexless worship from their fellows, for whom they are first among equals. Perhaps because we see no battle action in this story, a curious passivity seems to reign. Billy is a “cynosure”: a static magnet for admiration, and later a hapless target for malevolence. Although “to deal in double-meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature” and though he is hardly conscious of the pun involved when he bids farewell to his first ship, the “Rights of Man,” his creator Melville stands in for him in this function. “Indirection” is Melville's preferred mode, He exploits his impeccable hero as the locus of double dealing, innuendo, lies, ambiguity, treachery, perverted history, and finally popular legend. Simple goodness, and complex evil, may be freaks of human nature, ultimately unfathomable alike, but Melville refuses the passivity of his sailors, and intervenes to make some sense of mystery. As Polonius said to Reynaldo: “With assays of bias, By indirections find directions out.” Like God in the Portuguese proverb dear to Claudel, Melville seeks to write straight in crooked lines. Since the pun, like irony and oxymoron, is an oblique mode, he appeals to its devious resources in his search.The naval world provides a firm basis for this weaving approach, since it is governed by clear lines of demarcation: hierarchical vetoes, territorial imperatives, disciplinary codes. “Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head; no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness, and ends are attained by indirection.”
Racial and Ethnic Definition as Reflections of Public Policy
Authors: Novit-Evans Bette , Welch Ashton Wesley 
Published: January 2009

Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black, or Hispanic, or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. However, those cracks tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.Laws, regulations, guidelines, and judicial opinions are social artifacts which provide evidence about how a society deals with certain perceived problems. Laws are designed to serve social purposes and change as the purposes change; the specific form they may take reflects a need for congruence between laws as instruments of policy, and the purposes of policy. A survey of laws on race and ethnicity suggests three different policy aims: (1) laws mandating separation and disparate treatment, (2) laws prohibiting disparate treatment, and (3) laws encouraging aggregate changes in ethnic representation. Each purpose had a corresponding form of definition. If the purpose of a law is to mandate diverse treatment of individuals based on race or ethnicity, the law must be quite precise about who falls into which category, because an administrator is expected to make clear distinctions in individual cases.
The Blithedale Romance– Translation and Transformation: Mime and Mimesis
Authors: Swann Charles 
Published: January 2009

There is no need to compile a list of past criticism to make the case thatThe Blithedale Romanceis a fiction which has given rise to a remarkable number of interpretations and evaluations (even if judged by the strikingly high standards set by over a century of Hawthorne criticism). The text's concern with fluidity and its questionings of authoritative explanation have not made it any easier for a critical consensus to emerge.The Blithedale Romance, I am going to suggest, may usefully be approached by looking at the ways it foregrounds the question of the difficulties of description and the (inevitably) related problems of interpretation — by beginning from the juxtaposition of two names (Coverdale and Fauntleroy) and a recognition of what those names so contrastingly and problematically signify: translation and forgery. Among the dictionary definitions given for “to translate” are: to interpret, to explain, to change, to transform. Among those for “ to forge ” are: to pretend something to have happened, to make something in fraudulent imitation of something else, to make or devise something spurious.
“This Exchange of Epigrams”: Commodity and Style in Washington Square
Authors: Bell Ian F. A. 
Published: January 2009

“But he has no sense of history!” is a cry that is all too familiar in many Jamesian commentaries. The following essay attempts to provide a corrective to this complaint by reading Washington Square as a critique of a particular moment in the development of the bourgeois temperament. It is not insignificant that this is the only novel for which James chose a specific locale as a title, because historical time and geographical place are the issues which overtly confront the reader, to an extent (excepting The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima) insisted upon as nowhere else in James's works. The time is, predominantly, the difficult period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the place is that area of lower Manhattan which awkwardly bastions itself against contemporary turbulence.Dr. Sloper's deliberate choices of resistence are carefully located within a changing landscape, choices which match the period of Manhattan's most rapid expansion whereby the Island below Canal Street was condensed by overwhelming commercial pressure.
Gravity's Rainbow: Apocryphal History or Historical Apocrypha?
Authors: Marriott David 
Published: January 2009

Nineteenth century novelists felt constrained to supply their readers with well-chosen epigraphs, and the personal canons from which they drew them, whilst seldom exclusively Biblical, provided a convenient index to their individual literary and philosophical predilections. Thomas Pynchon's canon is wilfully idiosyncratic and frequently apocryphal, but his epigraphs are no less apposite than George Eliot's; for in creating a fictional world out of what is largely palpable history Pynchon produces a homogenous medium which is neither fiction nor history. I have chosen the epigraph above because in addition to illustrating this admixture of fiction and history it also intimates to the reader an aspect of Pynchon's technique which may go some way towards explaining the rationale behind it. Some parts ofGravity's Rainbow, I think, might best be described as an attempt at writing a twentieth century “gospel.”The Oxyrhynchus papyri, referred to in the epigraph actually exist. They were discovered in 1898 and 1904 in Egypt, and were fragments of purported sayings of Jesus of Nazareth dating from the second century A.D. Not until 1956, when the translation of a gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammedai in Egypt was completed, did it become clear that the Oxyrhynchus papyri were fragments of a work calling itself theGospel of Thomas.
Early Isolationism Revisited: Neutrality and Beyond in the 1790s
Authors: Rossignol Marie-Jeanne 
Published: January 2009

The term “isolationism,” still used today in discussions of contemporary United States policy, is “ fittingly…identified with a revulsion against the entanglements of world war.” For analysts using this concept, isolationism means American withdrawal from political connections with the rest of the world (no treaties and permanent alliances) and idealism in foreign policy (no secret clauses or deals). They consider that it has characterized American foreign policy since the first president took office and was expressed in Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 for the first time. Although the term appeared only in 1922, it is thus applied to early American foreign policy, as Lawrence S. Kaplan does in the chapter entitled “Toward isolationism: the Rise and Fall of the Franco-American Alliance 1775–1801” of hisEntangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson. According to Kaplan, this speech “became an enduring symbol of America's isolation,” and he defines early “isolationism” as follows: “…a freedom to enjoy access to all ports interested in receiving American products. It meant further a freedom from subservience to any foreign power, of the kind which had forced them into the service of a maternal economy or of dynastic wars in the past. Finally, it extended to a self-image of virtue and innocence that would be protected by advancing principles of peaceful relationships among nations.”Even if one thinks, like Albert K. Weinberg, that “isolationism” is a “poor theory,” which “has placed the discussion of American foreign policy in a sad predicament of obfuscation,” one has to admit with him that “mere scholars can change no social habit.”