This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]

By reading each of the novels of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre as ‘a travel story’, just as we read Balzac’s Père Goriot, it becomes necessary to read them as ‘a spatial practice’, a narrative that locates itself in and responds to a specific space. The specific geography of Kate O’Brien’s Parisian novels of development, Without My Cloak (1931), The…[Read more]

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

This rhetorical analysis of the phrase “The Rust Belt” asks the question Is The Rust Belt real or mythical? Does Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Subaltern’ caste now inhabit the (so-called) Rust Belt? Why can’t Rust Belt writers be heard?
“The Rust Belt” is not a title anyone living there would have chosen and yet we use it. Why? Also why should we depend…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

This essay surveys Thoreau’s antislavery writings from across his career and demonstrates the ecological concerns central to Thoreau’s abolitionist commitment.

A Robert Brownian Dramatic Dialogue

Whatever your theory and whatever your fandom, you don’t have to abandon it to do affect theory. This is because affect theory isn’t about telling you which side to pick in an agonistic contest; it’s about finding out what a body can do as it moves with other bodies in entangled states, whether or not we notice them. Affect theory offers more…[Read more]

Assembled cigar box fiddle. Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

The label is under the soundboard. Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

Course syllabus for Eng 260: Introduction to Women Writers focused on the theme of food fiction. Taught at Central Oregon Community College as a general education course. We are on the quarter system which limits the number of readings. The course will require that students complete a collaborative digital project.

Course syllabus for Eng 260: Introduction to Women Writers focused on the theme of food fiction. Taught at Central Oregon Community College as a general education course. We are on the quarter system which limits the number of readings. The course will require that students complete a collaborative digital project.

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

A contribution to a forum on Martin Delany, Blake; Or the Huts of America, ed. Jerome Mcgann.