In this book, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around such social issues of modernity as suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism.

In this study, Blair challenges Henry James' perceived status as the literary figurehead of an impregnable high culture. Emphasizing James' engagement in forms of popular culture (including ethnography, minstrelsy, photography, and journalism), Blair traces the ways in which his writing, steeped in these forms, acted as a force in the forging of racial, national, and cultural identity.

Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides the most up-to-date introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features newly commissioned essays, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Students and scholars of American and African-American literature will find this work invaluable.

Early Native American Writing is a collection of critical essays discussing the works of American Indian authors who wrote between 1630 and 1940 and produced some of the earliest literature in North American history. The first collection of critical essays that concentrates on this body of writing, this book highlights the writings of the American Indian authors considered, many only recently rediscovered, as important contributions to American letters.

Passionate readers both, Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain courted through books, spelling out their expectations through literary references as they corresponded during their frequent separations. Working with Langdon's own letters and diaries as well as Twain's, Harris traces the progress of their courtship within the larger context of Victorian American culture, showing how the couple negotiated their relationship through the mediums of literature, material culture, and social and familial dynamics.

Salem Story engages the story of the Salem witch trials through an analysis of the surviving primary documentation and juxtaposes that against the way in which our culture has mythologized the events of 1692. Salem Story examines a variety of individual motives that converged to precipitate the witch hunt. The book also examines subsequent mythologies that emerged from the events of 1692. Of the many assumptions about the Salem Witch Trials, the most persistent one remains that they were precipitated by a circle of hysterical girls. Through an analysis of what actually happened, through...

Peter Gibian explores the key role played by Oliver Wendell Holmes, senior, in what was known as America's "Age of Conversation." Holmes' multivoiced writings can serve as a key to open up the closed interiors of Victorian America, whether in saloons or salons, parlors or clubs, hotels or boarding houses. Combining social, intellectual, medical, legal and literary history with close textual analysis, and setting Holmes in dialoge with Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Fuller and Alcott, Gibian radically redefines the context for our understanding of the major literary works of the American...

The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and Reading the West examines the bases of that fascination. These critical essays by writers, independent scholars, and critics on the literature of the American West showcase new ways of reading and understanding western writing. This volume helps enrich our understanding of a distinguished body of literary work that has sometimes been unjustly ignored. It deals not only with literature but also with the changing conception of the West in the American imagination.

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

This is a historical critique of Henry James in relation to nineteenth-century feminism and women's fiction. Habegger has brought to light extensive new documentation on James's tangled connections with what was thought and written about women in his time. The emphasis is equally on his life and on his fictions. This is the first book to investigate his father's bizarre lifelong struggle with free love and feminism, a struggle that played a major role in shaping James. The book also shows how seriously he distorted the truth about the cousin, Minnie Temple, whose self-assertive image inspired...