Recently added articles from Studies in American Fiction:
Editor's comment.(Editorial)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern University has supported Studies in American Fiction consistently for more than three decades. My colleagues on SAF's internal editorial board and I are deeply grateful that the College's longstanding financial commitment, together with that ...
Stephen Crane and Methodism's realism: translating spiritual sympathy into urban experience.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... In 1883, three years after Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane died, the widowed Helen Crane moved their family from Port Jervis, New York to Asbury Park, New Jersey--one of the many resort towns that had recently sprung up along the Jersey Coast. This section of the Jersey Shore was familiar ...
Wedded to race: Charles Chesnutt's Stories of the Color Line.(The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line)(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Uncle Wellington, the title character of Charles W. Chesnutt's 1899 short story "Uncle Wellington's Wives," must grapple with an unusual marital problem. (1) It is a problem absent from most nineteenth-century fictions regarding marriage, and yet it was confronted by thousands of those ...
"Important, responsible work": Willa Cather's office stories and her necessary editorial career.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... In December 1908 Sarah Orne Jewett wrote a much-quoted letter to Willa Cather, in which she urged the younger woman to leave her "incessant, important, responsible work" as an editor at McClure's magazine to devote herself to her own writing. (1) Cather scholars and fans like this letter, ...
Poverty, payment, power: Kathleen Thompson Norris and popular romance.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... 2006 marked the fortieth anniversary of the death of Kathleen Thompson Norris. Who? I hear my under-fifty colleagues cry. The question is both understandable and remarkable, considering that between 1910 and 1950, Norris was the equivalent of Nora Roberts or Stephen King. The author of ...
"Militant expectations": childhood's end and millenarianism in Richard Powers' Operation Wandering Soul.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... I sent him my draft, to see if he might somehow be able to save it too from its inevitable end. My best intentions had failed to disperse the bleakness of the real. --Operation Wandering Soul Conclusion, then, is something Richard Powers would likely only come to in ...
Johnson, Joel A. Beyond Practical Virtue: A Defense of Liberal Democracy Through Literature.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Johnson, Joel A. Beyond Practical Virtue: A Defense of Liberal Democracy Through Literature. Columbus and London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2007. 163 pp. Paper: $37.50. Political scientist Joel Johnson uses plots and characters from classic works of American fiction to defend ...
Tawil, Ezra. The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Tawil, Ezra. The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006. 244 pp. Cloth: $85.00. In The Making of Racial Sentiment, Ezra Tawil makes several "counterintuitive" claims: that the frontier novels of the 1820s ...
Greven, David. Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Greven, David. Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 320 pp. Cloth: $69.75. At the center of David Greven's Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature is an intriguing question: what ...
Arsi, Branka. Passive Constitutions or 7 1/2 Times Bartleby.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Arsi, Branka. Passive Constitutions or 7 1/2 Times Bartleby. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007. xi + 210 pp. Cloth: $60.00. In 1948, a radio program called Favorite Story presented what is likely the first dramatization of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." The ...
Milder, Robert. Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine.(Melville's Bibles)(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Milder, Robert. Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. 310 pp. Cloth: $55.00. Pardes, Ilana. Melville's Bibles. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2008. 206 pp. Cloth: $60.00; paper: $24.95. The aesthetic turn in ...
Godden, Richard. William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Godden, Richard. William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. x + 251 pp. Cloth: $39.50. Opening on the observation that most of those who study the relationships between literature and the economy conceptualize those relationships in ...
McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2007. 209 pp. Cloth: $54.95; paper: $22.95. In Partial Faiths, John McClure demonstrates that contemporary American fiction is far more interested in religion ...