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Walt Whitman has long been regarded as the quintessential American bard, the poet who best represents all that is distinctive about life in the United States. Whitman himself encouraged this view, but he was also quick to remind his readers that he was an unlikely candidate for the office of national poet, and that his working-class upbringing and radical take on human sexuality often put him at odds with American culture. While American literary history has tended to credit Whitman with having invented the persona of the national outsider as the national bard, this book recovers three of Whitman's contemporaries who adopted similar personae: James M. Whitfield, an African American separatist and abolitionist; Eliza R. Snow, a Mormon pioneer and women's leader; and John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee journalist and Native-rights advocate. These three poets not only provide a counterpoint to the Whitmanian persona of the outsider bard, but also reframe the criteria by which generations of scholars have characterized Whitman as America's poet.

This book, the final volume of a trilogy, brings the author's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, it reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, the author shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more suggestive of the “negative dialectics” of Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left. Establishing new points of contact among Kenneth Fearing, Ann Petry, Alexander Saxton, Richard Wright, Jo Sinclair, Thomas McGrath, and Carlos Bulosan, the author argues that these writers were in dialogue with psychoanalysis, existentialism, and postwar modernism, often generating moods of piercing emotional acuity and cosmic dissent. He also recounts the contributions of lesser-known cultural workers, with a unique accent on gays and lesbians, secular Jews, and people of color. The vexing ambiguities of an era the author labels “late antifascism” serve to frame a collective biography.

This volume is a collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here chart an evolution of artistic consciousness. The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as “Five Vignettes,” while “Georgia Dusk” and the newly discovered poem “Tell Me” come from Toomer's Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. “The Blue Meridian” and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the book presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including “Imprint for Rio Grande.” “It Is Everywhere,” another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as “They Are Not Missed” and “To Gurdjieff Dying.” The introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker.

American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. This book challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in its analysis of four illuminating “episodes” of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. It examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. The book offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.

In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.

Gabriel García Márquez is one of the most influential writers of our time, with a unique literary creativity rooted in the history of his native Colombia. This revised and expanded edition of a classic work is the first book of criticism to consider in detail the totality of his magnificent oeuvre. This book traces the major forces that have shaped the novelist and describes García Márquez's life, his personality, and his politics. For this edition, new chapters cover all of García Márquez's fiction since 1988, from The General in His Labyrinth through Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and includes sections on his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and his journalistic account, News of a Kidnapping. Moreover, new information about García Márquezz's biography and artistic development make this a comprehensive account of his life and work.

Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the “East”—witness the popularity of the stories of the Arabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, and even the antics of fez-topped Shriners. This book provides a social and cultural history of this highly popular genre of Easternized performance in America up to the Great Depression. It argues that these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of the Arabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but, as the book shows, these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define “the American dream.” The recent success of Disney's Aladdin suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This account explains why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.

In this incisive study, Sarah Ehlers returns to the Depression-era United States in order to unsettle longstanding ideas about poetry and emerging approaches to poetics. By bringing to light a range of archival materials and theories about poetry that emerged on the 1930s left, Ehlers reimagines the historical formation of modern poetics. Offering new and challenging readings of prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Jacques Roumain, and uncovering the contributions of lesser-known writers such as Genevieve Taggard and Martha Millet, Ehlers illuminates an aesthetically and geographically diverse matrix of schools and movements. Resisting the dismissal of thirties left writing as mere propaganda, the book reveals how communist-affiliated poets experimented with poetic modes—such as lyric and documentary—and genres, including songs, ballads, and nursery rhymes, in ways that challenged existing frameworks for understanding the relationships among poetic form, political commitment, and historical transformation. As Ehlers shows, Depression left movements and their international connections are crucial for understanding both the history of modern poetry and the role of poetic thought in conceptualizing historical change.

Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to “love one's neighbor as oneself” with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, this book focuses its attention on aggressors—rather than the weak or abused—to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture. Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, the author shows how violence and sensibility work together to produce a more “sensitive” citizenry. Aggression becomes a site of redemptive possibility because salvation is gained when the powerful protagonist identifies with the person he harms. The author argues that this identification and emotional transformation come at a high price, however, as the reparative ends are bought with another's blood. Critics of nineteenth-century literature have tended to think about sentimentality and violence as opposing strategies in the work of nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Yet to understand how violence gets folded into sentimentality's egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal, Christian culture in the United States.

From the 1880s through 1920, the United States shifted from an identity of nativism and protectionism to one marked by an increasingly ambitious international outlook. By the early twentieth century, as Woodrow Wilson would later declare, the United States had become both the literal embodiment of all the earth's peoples and a nation representing all nations and cultures through its ethnic and cultural diversity. This purported capability to connect with all peoples, this book argues, allowed American literary writers to circulate their work internationally and thereby promote not only the nation's literary production but also the nation itself. Reexamining the relationship between progressivism and realism, the book demonstrates that the narratives constructed by American writers articulated a more active role for the United States in world affairs and helped to shift global influence from Europe to North America. From the novels of Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Abraham Cahan to the political and social writings of Woodrow Wilson and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book identifies a shared transnational imaginary that enabled realists and Progressives to articulate a stronger and more active role for the United States in international society.

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.

Between the Civil War and World War I the United States underwent the most rapid economic expansion in history. At the same time, the country experienced unparalleled rates of immigration. This book examines the convergence of these two extraordinary developments. No issue was more salient in postbellum American capitalist society, it argues, than the country's bewilderingly diverse population. This era marked the emergence of Americans' self-consciousness about what we today call multiculturalism. The book approaches this complex development from the perspective of print culture, demonstrating how both popular and elite writers played pivotal roles in articulating the stakes of this national metamorphosis. In a period of widespread literacy, writers assumed a remarkable cultural authority as best-selling works of literature and periodicals reached vast readerships and immigrants could find newspapers and magazines in their native languages. The book also looks at the work of journalists, photographers, social reformers, intellectuals, and advertisers. Identifying the years between 1865 and 1915 as the founding era of American multiculturalism, it provides a historical context that has been overlooked in contemporary debates about race, ethnicity, immigration, and the dynamics of modern capitalist society. The author's analysis recuperates a legacy with the potential to both invigorate current battle lines and highlight points of reconciliation.

This book contends that American women novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries registered a call for a new sexual freedom. By creating a lexicon of “sex expression,” many authors explored sexuality as part of a discourse about women's needs rather than confining it to the realm of sentiments, where it had been relegated by earlier writers. This new rhetoric of sexuality enabled critical conversations about who had sex, when in life they had it, and how it signified. The book explains that whether liberating or repressive, sexuality became a potential force for female agency in these women's novels, insofar as these novelists seized the power of rhetoric to establish their intellectual authority. Thus, it argues, they helped transform the traditional ideal of sexual purity into a new goal of sexual pleasure, defining in their fiction what intimacy between equals might become. Analyzing the work of canonical as well as popular writers—including Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Julia Peterkin, and Fannie Hurst, among others—the book demonstrates that the new sexualization of American culture was both material and rhetorical.

Drawing heavily from works of the era of post-civil rights modern and postmodern writers and poets from the South, this book approaches the experiences of segregation in the South in a radical manner. The African American, especially belonging to Louisiana and Mississippi, is no longer a victim of discrimination, but has reconstituted the space that is rightfully theirs. The book bases its analyses on the writings of Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Olympia Vernon, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sybil Kein, and others. In a sense, the book redefines the black space by making a distinction between social processes and spatial ones, and redraws its map extending the territory beyond its perceived limitations of the Deep South. In this recreated and reclaimed place and space, writers have diffused the racial exclusion and the White racial hegemony that were believed to have prevailed during the times of slavery and segregation and racial separation.

The second of three volumes that track the political and personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers, this book carries forward the chronicle launched in Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. In this volume, the author delves into literary, emotional, and ideological trajectories of radical cultural workers in the era when the International Brigades fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the United States battled in World War II (1941–45). Probing in detail the controversial impact of the Popular Front on literary culture, he explores the ethical and aesthetic challenges that pro-Communist writers faced, and presents a cross-section of literary talent, from the famous to the forgotten, the major to the minor. The writers examined include Len Zinberg (a.k.a. Ed Lacy), John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Henry Roth, Lauren Gilfillan, Ruth Mc-Kenney, Morris U. Schappes, and Jo Sinclair. The author also uncovers dramatic new information about Arthur Miller's complex commitment to the Left. Confronting heartfelt questions about Jewish masculinity, racism at the core of liberal democracy, the corrosion of utopian dreams, and the thorny interaction between antifascism and Communism, he re-creates the intellectual and cultural landscape of a remarkable era.

Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. This book describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. It argues that in presenting literary history this way, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have—and, the book suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.