In 1949, Montreal poet Louis Dudek circulated a package of poetry manuscripts through a decentralized network of writers working in the U.S. and Canada that he called the “Poetry Grapevine.” In the manifesto-like instructions for the project, Dudek declares that “THERE IS A LOT MORE HAPPENING IN OUR DAILY LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS (NOT TO SPEAK OF UN…[Read more]

This chapter makes two critical interventions: one to redirect attention to women’s writing on Greece from a century that was dominated by either a masculine homosocial modernity or Byron’s long shadow in David Roessel’s sense (2002); and two, revising the critical scotoma that surrounds Hellenism as a process of power and style of thought in th…[Read more]

Our work in this course will center around two questions. First, what were the material and social conditions for Black men, women, and children living in the territory that would become the United States, from roughly 1750 until on or about 1860? While slavery is likely the first concept that comes to mind, additional concepts such as racism,…[Read more]

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many tribes and subcultures of Britain’s teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of the most important contemporary British wri…[Read more]

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many tribes and subcultures of Britain’s teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of the most important contemporary British wri…[Read more]

Despite their commitment to Ezra Pound’s commandment to “make it new!:” modernist authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder referred to Jane Austen surprisingly often in their public and private writings. Although they excoriated her sexual inexperience and limited…[Read more]

What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the “fugitive” is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

Talitha LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South ambitiously takes on the task of highlighting the roles that black women played in the modernization of the Georgian economy and culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; roles that were products of material and ideological circumstances as well as a…[Read more]

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]

This essay identifies four major factors responsible for the use of vernacular in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. Analyses of selected texts by Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Kendel Hippolyte, and DerekWalcott illustrate that these four factors include the representation of working class characters, subversive protests against the imposition of…[Read more]

Critically surveys the long premodern history of race and racism, colonization and imperialism, and globalism, across c. 1000-1500 CE.

Critically surveys the long premodern history of race and racism, colonization and imperialism, and globalism, across c. 1000-1500 CE.

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]