abstract: This article reads Natalie Diaz’s “Manhattan is a Lenape Word” as a decolonial lyric that dismantles colonial modernity by reframing the Enlightenment opposition between light and darkness. Through the metaphor of electric light and Indigenous night, Diaz exposes how modernity’s illumination enacts surveil-lance and alienation while reimagining darkness as relational and restorative. Set in Lenapehoking, the poem’s erotic encounters reveal intimacy as both resistant and complicit, dramatizing the entanglement of desire and power. Drawing on Indigenous thinkers Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Joy Harjo, and N. Scott Momaday, the article situates Diaz within a lineage that teaches through ceremony, relation, and cosmology. By shifting knowledge from sight to touch, Diaz turns darkness into a teacher that unsettles colonial ways of knowing.
abstract: The “Index” to Marianne Moore’s Observations (1924) is an unusual text. Authored by Moore herself and composed not of first lines, but an unexpected miscellany of “subjects” drawn from her poems, the “Index” is all the more remarkable for being so seldom remarked upon. This essay seeks to remedy the fact that despite its uniqueness—or perhaps because of it—Moore’s “Index” has received almost no critical attention in the century since its publication. One mode of reading the “Index” presented here involves reversing the process of indexing: in other words, listing each poem alongside all “Index” entries that refer back to it, thereby allowing us to trace the compositional choices Moore made in the fall of 1924. Because I often refer to this de- alphabetized “Index” throughout the essay, and because I hope to make it available to those who may be interested, it is included as an appendix.
In Contending Forces, Pauline Hopkins uses the boarding house as a model for transforming the romantic novel at the turn of the twentieth century. This essay argues that the social and architectural space of the boarding house maps onto the novel's ability to incorporate alternate discourses by "renting out" narrative space to genres like naturalism, historical narrative, and political oratory. Unlike mid-nineteenth century boarding-house fiction, which framed the boarding-house as a site of familial and class dissolution, Hopkins treats the boarding house as a place in which social ties are forged and repaired. The novel thus functions formally as a "boarding house of genre," bringing together disparate discursive and aesthetic modes under one roof while untethering the romance from its historical investment in homeownership. The novel thus leverages the built environment to index a historical juncture between Black political thought and the changing aesthetic and political meanings of the novel.
In the United States in 1906, euthanasia emerged as a contested site for cultural authority over human pain, entangling law, medicine, and aesthetics. Amidst the public exchange of these ethical arguments, Edith Wharton drafted The Fruit of the Tree (1907), dramatizing an unequivocal act of euthanasia. This article situates Wharton's novel within the 1906 euthanasia debates and argues that The Fruit of the Tree recasts the ethics of euthanasia as a problem of genre: between sentimentalism and realism. The novel tests the affective excess of sentimental fiction against the stoic disinterestedness of aesthetic realism. By contrasting scenes of bodily injury-from an industrial worker's mangled arm to a mill owner's shattered spine-Wharton demonstrates how literary modes regulate the biopolitical legibility of suffering. Acts of reading determine life or death. Wharton thus reimagines how the modern American novel might both signify and govern the body in pain.
An important Western context for Frank Norris's McTeague (1899) is the 1846-48 Mexican-American War and its impact on the Mexican population living in Alta Califor-nia. This context is particularly significant for Norris's char-acter Maria Macapa, in whose depiction the novel's racialized contexts are revealed. Norris's studies exposed him to theories of nativism, evolutionary progress, and racial hierarchies, and his representation of Maria Macapa emphasizes these contexts in relation to the histories of Alta California, her dispossession and death suggesting empire's brutal afterlives and what is lost with the ending of such stories. I read Maria's narrative in this context and in relation to the Californio testimonios gathered as part of Hubert Howe Bancroft's history of California. Finally, attending to Maria's story highlights contradictions in Norris's theories of romance, which, even in its representation of a sort of raw and unfiltered "life," participates in the elision of various kinds of truth.
This response situates the essays in this issue within the broader framework of American antimodernism or modernity critique, as articulated by T. J. Jackson Lears. It argues that this framework remains as salient to present-day political and cultural conflicts as to the writings of the 189os. Further, noting the essays' emphasis on the multifarious genres, exceeding realism, within this period's writings, it argues that debates about the status of modernity often play out therein in the form of tensions between generic modes. The piece goes on to suggest that political rhetoric within today's Americanist criticism shares some romantic-that is, antimodern and mythmaking-proclivities with the contemporary right; thus, despite their deeply meaningful divergences, themes such as antistatism can subtend the two sides. In contrast, the generically heterogeneous novels discussed here are able to raise questions about modernity's dangers from a point of view less wedded to its idealized overcoming.
This essay proposes that the genre of black naturalism, most commonly associated with 1940s African American literature, begins with Paul Laurence Dunbar's writings on African American migration to the urban North. Although Dunbar writes about black migration in a naturalist manner as early as 1897, his 1902 novel, The Sport of the Gods, is his most comprehensive black naturalist statement. Other critics have described the novel as naturalist but overstate the degree to which its naturalism consists in a critique of the genre's racism or limited relevance to African Americans. Instead of treating the whiteness of naturalism as a given for Dunbar, I argue that he inaugurates a specifically black naturalism around the turn of the twentieth century to respond to the consolidation of Jim Crow, black migration to the urban North, and increasing class separation between African Americans.
The role of voice as an enabling grounds of democratic self-determination hinges on its status as a reliable index and medium of the people's will. A potential crisis in this arrangement, though, is introduced by voices that register as delinked from their putative sources. Multiple disembodied, augmented, or acousmatic voices and noises circulate throughout Pauline Hopkins's novel 1902-03 Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self; at the heart of the novel is the soprano Dianthe, whose relationships to her voice, agency, and consciousness are continually in flux. In Of One Blood, Hopkins marshals recent developments in psychological research and her career-long interest in the human voice, mediated through the novel's polyvocal tendencies, to imagine a nonsingular-yet not fully impersonal-mode of consciousness and selfhood that, Hopkins proposes, can effectively dramatize the confining frameworks of race and gender, and can suggest ways of escaping America altogether.
I argue that Mark Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) reveals the similarly deceptive qualities of magic and science that facilitate interpersonal fraud and largescale violence. First, I close read the novel with special attention to the dynamic between science and what it rejects, especially to the extent that Twain disassociates science from its attachment to concepts like democracy and progress. To further understand Twain's project in Connecticut Yankee, I then compare the novel to several other politically minded time travel narratives: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, William Dean Howells's The Traveler from Altruria (and sequels), William Morris's News from Nowhere, and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Not only does Connecticut Yankee foreshadow Twain's increasing turn toward a grumpy, critical radicalism, the novel's description of liars and bloodshed stands as relatively exceptional among contemporary late-nineteenth-century utopian novels.
Through a law-and-literature interpretive frame and "surface reading," this essay examines the principles of due process and equal protection in Charles Chesnutt's "The Sheriff's Children"-the first belletristic work of African American literature, I contend, to offer a sustained exploration of anti-Black lynch logic. Focusing on the story's moments of representation (circa 1875) and production (1889), it historicizes and contextualizes Chesnutt's early critique of a white lynch-mob mentality, while demonstrating a two-prolonged legal argument at stake: on the one hand, an ironic representation of the discrepancies between de jure and de facto legal practices, when race is a factor, that plays out on the text's surface; and on the other, a tacit unveiling of "incidents" and "badges" of slavery, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, that come to light through the prism of such a surface reading, thus revealing new insight into the story's symbolic and allegorical dimensions that reside beneath.
The reading in this essay is made possible by the identification of a mode of distinctive characterization found in the American literary romances, including Flannery O'Connor's. This insight has generated an original, literary-psychological way of reading that is partly biographical, and focuses on mood rather than desire. Characters that function in this mode are identifiable by how their characterization deviates from realism, and, in addition to their role in the overt narrative, they can be seen as embodying preoccupying feelings of their authors. Here, in a departure from previous readings, O'Connor's Misfit is read as voicing the feelings of distress that she herself was experiencing after having received her diagnosis of a terminal illness. Reading from this perspective reveals an additional, sustained dimension of significance in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." It also gives further insight into O'Connor's intention in including extreme violence in this story and others.
The bulk of the Egyptian American playwright Yussef El Guindi's plays depict the Arab-Muslim experience in the United States. His plays, which constitute immigrant narratives contesting the mainstream hegemonic discourse, portray Arab immigrants striving to integrate into the American mainstream culture while struggling to change their distorted racial profiling and ethnic stereotypes propagated by American media. This article provides a close textual postcolonial feminist reading in the context of trauma theory and orientalist discourse of El Guindi's dark comedy Threesome. Through the lens of postcolonial feminism, orientalism and trauma theory, the article explores how characters express their transnational Arab American citizenship and sense of belonging thus challenging the distorted longstanding stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women both in the United States and the Arab World. Consequently, they strive to construct counterhegemonic narratives and resistance literature against racial profiling of Arab and Muslim American women.
While Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was no Edward Gibbons, like his European counterparts he did use footnotes. Yet for all we know about Brown's authorship and editing, no one has systematically examined the ways he used them in his entire corpus of writing. My essay examines how eighteenth-century American use of footnotes was adapted to specific cultural and literary circumstances and how Brown's use of the footnote over time changes in terms of form and content. In mapping where Brown's footnotes appear, I argue that as his understanding of the American Indian evolved he makes an epistemic shift from using footnotes for factual information to using them as an alternative discourse which questions, with increasing irony, colonial conceptions of Indigenous people not just in America but globally in the Asian-Pacific. Brown's use of footnotes, I suggest, also raises questions about the role of the footnote in American literary history.
In this paper, I read The Call of the Wild (1903) within the twin contexts of what I call "long Modernism"-a strand of American literature stretching from around 1850 until the 1950s, and a more narrowly defined era of "classic" Modernism in English in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I argue that London's text manifests many of the features generally identified with Modernism-including alienation from self and society, rupture (of text, place, and self), dislocation and displacement, and Primitivism-and that the extent of London's formal experimentation has not previously been recognized by critics too eager to label London a Naturalist or similar.
This article argues that the internet is iterative ofHeide-gger's conception of everydayness through a close reading of No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Unlike other autofiction which has provided straightforward mimetic representations of web-native style, Lockwood intentionally warps that style, granting some vantage on the topic of the internet itself in the process. This distortion of a familiar style is catalyzed when the protagonist's niece is born with a fatal illness and soon passes. The experience of her niece's short life constitutes a "moment of vision" for the protagonist, (temporarily) altering her understanding of herself along with her relationship with the internet. This schism presents a critical vantage for a phenomenological analysis of the multivalent functionality of the internet. As a manifestation of everydayness, the internet marks itself as that which the literary novel has often taken as its subject: everyday life.
This essay focuses on the encounter of first-person narrator Rutherford Calhoun with the Allmuseri god aboard the slave ship the Republic in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990). While earlier scholarship relegated the significance of the Allmuseri god to a mere subplot, Marc Conner argues that it represents the novel's pivotal moment, signifying Rutherford's spiritual conversion. This essay builds upon Conner's analysis, positing that the encounter serves not as a spiritual awakening but as a catalyst for Rutherford's personal growth, transforming him from cynical to altruistic. Moreover, the essay explores this encounter through "Outpicturing," a divinely induced experience within Allmuseri culture, alongside Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and transitional beings. Ultimately, it concludes that the Almmuseri god compelled Rutherford to embrace his destiny and return to the United States to fulfill his role as an engaged citizen during the presidency of pro-slavery advocate Andrew Jackson.
The traumatic center of Richard Powers's Prisoner's Dilemma lies in the main character's exposure to radiation from America's first nuclear bomb detonation at the Trinity test site. This experience motivates Eddie Hobson to generate a fantastic World War II narrative that includes a radically irrational act of releasing internal enemy aliens-Americans of Japanese ancestry-from internment camps. This article analyzes a reversal of Cold War game theory, genealogical displacement as a challenge to wartime racial ideology, minority draft resisters' critique of civil liberties, and contradictions in global peace promotion through all-powerful weapons. Also, the concept of symbolic survivors sheds lights on enigmas surrounding Eddie Hobson. Overall, drawing insights from Japanese American history and literature, this study explores the possibility of a counternarrative against wartime narratives of suspicion and mistrust.
In this essay, I consider the historical uses and limits of shame and shaming rhetoric in efforts to advocate for racial justice through a comparative reading of an unlikely pair of artifacts: a public speech by Frederick Douglass, offered in London in 1846, and, a photograph of student activists, demanding their right to public education during a 1963 protest in Farmville, Virginia. The obvious differences in these artifacts only make their commonalities even more striking: rather than deploying shame to identify moral failings and elicit self-reflection and self-correction, both threaten the exposure of American hypocrisy, racism, and injustice to international audiences. Through its comparative reading of these artifacts, the essay works through contradictory claims about shame's utility made by scholars in political philosophy, public policy, and psychology, and it identifies the historical limits of shame's value in the American discourse of racial justice.
This paper examines the authorship of the Anti-Masonic satire Morganiana (1828), using a combination of traditional archival reasoning and computer-aided stylometric analyses to suggest Edgar Allan Poe as a potential author. The paper considers Poe's early years against the Anti-Masonic movement, exploring the movement's role in the formation of US national identity and locating its origins in the literary disputes of the Jacksonian era. It interrogates the intersection of conspiracy theories, literary production, and stylistic norms, drawing parallels between nineteenth-century Anti-Masonic rhetoric and contemporary digital conspiracism to demonstrate how conspiratorial reasoning is an output of aristocratic literary cultures, not a populist formation pitched against those cultures. By recontextualizing Morganiana as a possible artifact of Poe's juvenilia, the study advances ongoing debates about authorship, cultural politics, and the application of digital tools in literary scholarship, while cautioning against the uncritical adoption of computational methods divorced from political and archival considerations. Every genuine author, in a greater or less degree, leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. Rufus Griswold, "Memoir of the Author" (xxxix)
In 1847-48 Emerson journeyed to Great Britain, lecturing first in industrial cities in the north, then in London, during a time of socio-economic transformation and political unrest. In the next several years he would travel extensively through cities, towns, farmlands, and forests in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. My focus in this essay is on how Emerson's experiences in England and the Midwest combined to shape his vision of Anglo-American civilization as expressed first in the lecture "The Anglo-American" (1852-1855; published 2001), then in English Traits (1856), and on how his judgment of Western democracy and its influence on American character comports with, and can be illuminated by, historian Frederick Jackson Turner's career-long engagement with Western democracy in the studies collected in The Frontier in American History (1920). It is said, if you would see the American, you must cross the Alleghanies. Emerson, "The Anglo-American" (1852-1855) The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Problem of the West" (1896; 1921)
