Studies in American Fiction back issues from March 1993:
Salem is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Mar 22, 1993; ... That certain scholars own certain writers is a truism. Leon Edel owns Henry James, for example. And we instantly pair Carlos Baker and Hemingway; and the same for Matthew Bruccoli and Fitzgerald. When it comes to the triumvirate of nineteenth-century American literature, however - ...
Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne's Fiction.
Mar 22, 1993; ... A great many recent critical studies feature participles in their titles. I'm not sure what this general trend signifies, unless it is a refraction of postmodern decentering, a rejection of the idea of the great tradition (to give an example of the kind of authoritativeness critical ...
Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature.
Mar 22, 1993; ... In her first work of literary criticism, poet and novelist Gayl Jones takes on the challenging task of defining, in precise stylistic terms, the distinctive qualities of modern African-American literature. Containing fifteen short chapters organized around the three genres of poetry, short ...
Meaning in Henry James.
Mar 22, 1993; ... This book deserves a salutary welcome. Unlike so many other recent monographs on James, determined to be "clever," Meaning in Henry James contents itself with being clear, for which most readers assuredly will be grateful. To say Professor Bell is plain spoken is not to say she is simple; ...
Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut.
Mar 22, 1993; ... From the earliest serious criticism of his fiction, which did not begin until nearly twenty years after publication of his first novel (Player Piano) in 1952, Kurt Vonnegut's reputation has suffered from the charge that he was at once too light and too dark, alternately sentimental and ...
Melville's first short story: a parody of Poe. (Notes )
Mar 22, 1993; ... In 1839, having failed to secure a job as a surveyor on the Erie Canal Project, and concerned over his mother's indebtedness, the twenty-year old Melville wrote "Fragments from a Writing Desk," which were published anonymously in his hometown newspaper, the Democratic Press of ...
Dimmesdale and his bachelorhood: 'priestly celibacy' in 'The Scarlet Letter.'
Mar 22, 1993; ... In a list of considerations in his classic "Hawthorne's Hester" that render Dimmesdale more excusable than Chillingworth but less so than Hester in The Scarlet Letter's calculus of guilt, Darrel Abel rates of importance "above all" the circumstance that unlike Hester, Dimmesdale "is free ...
J.P. Morgan and Gatsby's name. (Notes)
Mar 22, 1993; ... When Fitzgerald has young James Gatz christen himself "Gatsby," he gives his readers a riddle to ponder. Although the names of Gatsby's cohorts have been duly analyzed, Gatsby's name has proven "a difficult puzzle to solve."(1) Several authors have attempted to discover its origins. One ...
Speaking with 'hands at our throats': the struggle for artistic voice in 'The Blithedale Romance.'
Mar 22, 1993; ... In her feminist assessment of The Blithedale Romance, Mary Suzanne Schriber explores Zenobia's motivations for suicide: "how," she asks, "[are we] to judge Zenobia's death, reportedly a suicide for love of the reformer Hollingsworth, in light of her feminist protestations?"(1) Schriber ...
Israel Potter: Melville's 'citizen of the universe.'
Mar 22, 1993; ... If there was ever a moment when Herman Melville stood a chance of recouping the readership he had lost by publishing Moby-Dick and Pierre, it may have been with the release, in 1855, of Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. Written at the height of his powers (just after "The ...
'The Confidence-Man': Melville and the problem of others.
Mar 22, 1993; ... No characteristic of Melville marks his mind more clearly as modern than his profound engagement with questions of epistemology. Ever since Descartes, modern thought has been primarily concerned with establishing firm foundations for knowledge. Locke, for instance, recognized "that all ...
Sincerity, secrecy, and lies: Helen Hunt Jackson's no name novels.
Mar 22, 1993; ... Until the last six years of her life, Helen Jackson's career as a nineteenth-century American women writer was in so many ways conventional that most contemporary critics conclude, as Cheryl Walker does in The Nightingale's Burden, that "for Jackson the culturally determined literary ...
The languages of 'Losing Battles.'
Mar 22, 1993; ... Although they serve a common end, written and spoken language complement and compete with each other in Eudora Welty's Losing Battles. Teaching, writing, and books are the province of Julia Mortimer, who dies on the morning of Granny Vaughn's reunion. Lexie Renfro had presumed to be ...
Irony and subversion in James Weldon Johnson's 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man'.
Mar 22, 1993; ... Near the end of James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the narrator, a mulatto, wonders when Southern "liberals" will recognize the implications of the limits put upon free speech by "Southern opinion."(1) While the narrator doesn't expand upon this remark, ...