In light of the burgeoning sub-field of collaboration studies, this essay considers unconventional collaborations such as those between living and dead writers. While James frequently evokes Nathaniel Hawthorne, none of his works more directly engages with his precursor than The Bostonians (1886), which reworks the themes and plot of The Blithedale Romance (1852). By reading The Bostonians as an act of imaginative collaboration, we develop a richer understanding of this novel's achievement, its exploration of gender and sexual politics, on the one hand, and its critique of nineteenth-century reform, on the other hand, which has powerful implications for the former.

This book explores the construction of male sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature and comes up with some startling findings. Far from desiring heterosexual sex and wishing to bond with o

Troubling Our Heads About Ichabod: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood offers a close reading of Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" that considers its treatment of the figure of the solitary Ichabod in light of recent treatments of the story as representative of powerful bonds between men. This essay considers Irving's construction of Woman as an uncannily mysterious force that traps Ichabod Crane into compulsory heterosexuality; it also considers the ways in which the story pits isolate, inviolate manhood against fraternity. In addition, the recent film version of Irving's story and two other film adaptations of classic American literature are treated in order to broaden and support the central claim that a highly diversified and ongoing fetishization of fraternity dominates American thought. Given the commonplace nature of the critical position that reproductive heterosexualityÑwhen considered as, in Michael Warner's view, " repronarrative"Ñis a compulsory demand of capitalist citizenship, one might also imagine that, with their widely documented sheer social pervasiveness, same-sex intimacies would now be taken as a given in studies of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, however, a diverse array of critics, commentators, and theorists continue to treat nineteenth century (and current forms of) homosociality as transgressive. Despite the multiple critiques from feminist and queer scholars, fraternalist fantasies continue to proliferate not only in treatments of nineteenth century American literature but also in certain men's studies and queer theory texts, which would otherwise certainly seem like unlikely allies. Hollywood film adaptations of classic American literature also reinforce fraternalist biases. This essay primarily critiques the willingness in literary criticism, men's studies, queer theory, and mainstream film to celebrate homoaffectional bonds at the expense of ignoring the evidence of the compulsory nature of homosocial ties, the recurring literary interest in treating the homosocial as a field of competitive cruelty, and the abject status of the isolate outsider who has not been assimilated into male collectives.

Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out (2017) has been generally acclaimed for its unflinching critique of American racism, made even more notable by the East Coast, liberal-elite setting of the film. While the film commendably organizes its mainstream horror narrative around an African American male protagonist, the film’s depiction of femininity has proven controversial. This essay explores the gender politics of the film’s depiction of women, especially but not exclusively its White female characters. Drawing on perspectives from psychoanalytic theory, intersectionality, and feminist horror studies, the essay considers the film’s reworking of Carol Clover’s figure of the “Final Girl” who alone survives the horror movie bloodbath. The function of Peele’s Final Girl is less clearly positive, given that this figure is the film’s ultimate villain. The essay explores intersections between the film and psychoanalytic attitudes toward female caregivers who fail to conform to gendered standards, theorizing that betrayal emerges as a significantly gendered concept. Get Out unusually depicts maternal loss as a central aspect of its male protagonist’s psychology while also foregrounding maternal and other forms of female betrayal.

Fragments and Fury David Greven (bio) Bruce Isaacs. The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $39.95 paperback. I have often considered my critical stance on Brian De Palma an anomalous one. While I consider Alfred Hitchcock the greatest of classical Hollywood directors (a placeholder description given his transatlantic career), I consider De Palma the greatest postclassical Hollywood director. Important critics of De Palma, such as Adrian Martin, Terrence Rafferty, Thomas Leitch, Pauline Kael, and especially Robin Wood, have defended his aesthetics, and specifically defended his work against the dread charge of “ripping-off Hitchcock,” but not very many critics have written from a position of partisanship for both directors. (Kael famously angered Andrew Sarris and others by perversely proclaiming De Palma the infinitely greater director, but Eyal Peretz essentially follows suit in his book on De Palma, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses [Stanford University Press, 2008].) In The Art of Pure Cinema, Bruce Isaacs has, more than any other critic I have read, shed light on the peculiar and heady relationship between Hitchcock and De Palma, and in so doing has produced a thrilling account of De Palma’s aesthetics that illustrates its singular force and overlaps with Hitchcock’s. Isaacs also sheds revelatory light on Hitchcock, who, while not the sole focus of this book, is treated with ample rigor. Perhaps most thrillingly of all, Isaacs stages— and ably inspires—a bracing conversation among Hitchcock and several of his “imitators”: De Palma and the giallo [End Page 146] directors Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci. This is a book I have long waited for, and it exceeds my expectations in its finesse, rigor, insightfulness, and—most notable of all—committed demonstration of the art of close reading and textual analysis in this era of detachment and distance in Film Studies, characterized by what we can call archival hegemony. Isaacs brilliantly breaks new ground by covering the seemingly well-covered terrain of Hitchcock’s theory of “pure cinema.” Excavating the meanings of this term, how Hitchcock got to it, and what it means for his cinema and its disciples is Isaacs’s foundation. He points out that a desire to create “a cinema unaffiliated with earlier artistic forms” was not unique to Hitchcock but a goal shared by many early twentieth-century aesthetic modernists (15). “Pure cinema . . . was a European avant-garde movement that emerged during the mid-1920s in Paris,” incorporating elements of German expressionism and Soviet montage and exemplified by the work of filmmakers Henri Chomette and Germaine Dulac (16). The latter was particularly relevant to Hitchcock’s early development as a film theorist, as was, of course, F.W. Murnau, the great German expressionist director whose filmmaking Hitchcock observed first-hand (The Last Laugh, 1924). Isaacs discusses connections between Murnau’s and Dulac’s views on pure cinema, which coalesced in Hitchcock’s thought. Isaacs makes sure to clarify that Hitchcock did not take an active interest in Dulac’s writings and films; instead, “his aesthetic development occurred in relative proximity to the emergence” of the pure cinema movement that Dulac led (18). Isaacs contends that Hitchcock’s cinema is one in which “narrative and representational form is increasingly distilled into the abstraction of cinema’s pure formal and phenomenological elements: relations within space, movement, time (and thus duration), perception, affect, and intensity” (23). No wonder the giallo artists found his work so resonant! An early section of Isaacs’s book includes a remarkably fresh and detailed look at the scene in Frenzy [End Page 147] (1972) when the murderer Rusk takes the deeply likable Babs, his unfortunate next victim, up the stairs to his flat, saying she is really “my type of woman,” before Hitchcock’s camera ominously backtracks into the street, where the ambient street noises slowly engulf the soundtrack. Isaacs painstakingly analyzes this sequence in order to demonstrate Hitchcock’s negotiation, tethered to the impact of the tracking shot, of realist and anti-realist techniques, and he emphasizes a new excessiveness in the director’s style, excess being a key linkage among Hitchcock and his adrenalized...

Between panels at a recent American literature conference, I spoke with a younger, very much up-and-coming scholar about my current work on literary influence and nineteenth-century American literature and how it had led me back, with renewed appreciation, to the work of F. O. Matthiessen, Marius Bewley, and others writing in the postwar period significant for some of the best American critical writing. Immediately, as if reading from a script, the up-and-coming scholar began reciting Matthiessen's ideological lapses, blindnesses, offenses, the impoverished nature of his all-white, all-male literary canon, his idea of a canon at all. As I explained, part of my project (begun in these pages in a special issue I edited on Hawthorne and literary influence) is to reread these works and to explore the gender, race, and sexual politics of influence. I realize that if my work is to succeed, it will have to make this younger scholar quite persuaded that earlier literary critics spoke from unenlightened perspectives see the point in revisiting questions like influence, canons and traditions, and works written by white male authors past and present.By these criteria, Christopher Castiglia's book won't be counted as a success. It most likely fails to persuade readers like my younger, immediately skeptical and suspicious scholar-between-panels of the value of the critical writings and general dispositions of the postwar critics under discussion. It does not foreground the concerns over racism, white male hierarchical networks, sexism, and so forth that have dominated literary studies for so many years now but are especially urgent and pressing in our present critical and national moment. It also makes little reference to the other preponderant concern in Americanist literary studies today, the historical reconstruction of the American past with an eye on the ideological and ethical concerns, and especially the failures and limitations, of these prior eras. In any case, Castiglia has written a revelatory book that might bewilder some scholars and entrance others. The most hopeful practice it models, in the end, may be the stimulation of new, yet unimagined readers who will be drawn to the surprising, sometimes agonized, often exhilarating critical voices Castiglia gives fresh articulation.Focusing on critics once widely read but much less frequently invoked today, such as Bewley, Newton Arvin, Richard Chase, and, before them, Granville Hicks and Constance Rourke, Castiglia argues that they model “practices of hope,” not a flimsy or jejune kind derived from a disavowal of social reality and its grave difficulties. Rather, their writing foregrounds and thematizes “hope, as a perpetual openness to the as-yet-untried … an end in itself.” Hope is “a disposition,” one that prioritizes “illusion, whimsy, vision, reverie, daydreams, all sources of world making trivialized within disciplinary regimes of the ‘real’” (4). Hope denies “the imperative precedents of history or the limits on possibility imposed by truth claims grounded in empirical appeals to material ‘reality.’” Instead, hope opens up the imagination to “abstract values, suggesting new applications for venerable concepts” and engaging readers “in the speculative world making it models and inspires” (6). Hope gets us past the intensely ideological focus on American literature's ideological shortcomings, a focus that Castiglia provocatively designates “Cold War melancholy.” Our critical era's pervasive stances of suspicion toward the objects we study and unyielding focus on the ideological dimensions—and most often, the failures—of these objects is, Castiglia avers, a holdover from the Cold War and McCarthyite 1950s, with its cultures of suspicion and paranoia—and persecution. Castiglia's reconsiderations of arguments put forth by leading New Americanists such as Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels establishes Cold War melancholy as a foundational mode for much of the contemporary Americanist approach to literary study.While I do have some reservations about hope as a model—what about artistic ambition, and its potential for overreaching and liberatory ecstasy and achievement?—Castiglia provides a significant resource in his painstaking, well-informed, lucid evocations of his central critics' writings, insights, approaches, governing principles, and audacious critical panache. While even Castiglia's nuanced and probing insightfulness cannot do much to enliven the dullness of Granville Hicks's work, and while Castiglia's treatment of Rourke, who would greatly benefit from renewed attention, promises more than it delivers, his major contribution is to the study of Richard Chase, Marius Bewley, and, especially, Newton Arvin.Drawing on unpublished papers, Castiglia draws out the ambiguities in these critics' writings and focuses, with special intensity and revelation, on their shared investment in “homosexuality … [as] a form of socialist humanism,” one that “shaped … symbolist aesthetics.” The radicalism of this critical stance lay in the hard fact that the critics were writing during the McCarthy era and its relentless persecution of homosexuals as well as communists, classified as threats to a perceived American moral and social cohesion. “At a time when homosexuals were reviled in clinical, legal, and political discourse, these critics, making homosexuality the political heart of their methodologies, put it at the center of the emerging field of American literary studies” (23), Castiglia writes. With extraordinary empathy and acumen, Castiglia reanimates these dormant critical bodies, giving them a resilient and challenging new life.The authors that emerge as particularly central to all these critics are Melville and Hawthorne, seen as the core of American Romantic writing, on which the critics focused as the most significant phase in American letters. Certainly, reading Castiglia, I kept thinking that Hawthorne in particular needs a critical overhaul, given the fairly sustained and dated image of him as the Salem recluse shunning all social contact and burrowing further inward, an image that would appear to have been dominant in this era, particularly in the writings of Arvin and Bewley.That limitation aside, the critics wrote with a particularly acute, even savage intensity about the radical commitments and achievements of American Romantic authors. Particularly emboldening is Castiglia's treatment of Arvin's resistant celebrations of models of same-sex love in the works of Melville and Whitman and, perhaps most intriguingly, Longfellow. Arvin's writings on these subjects are particularly resistant considering the notorious criminalization of homosexuality not only in Arvin's era but also in his own life, as he was hounded out of his position from Smith College in the 1960s and arrested for that era's version of gross indecency for receiving muscle mags in the mail. Castiglia also sheds welcome new light on Bewley's writings and his agonized position as an English writer and gay man living in the United States who received opprobrium from both American and English critics for insufficiently representing either nation with requisite patriotic idolatry.The critic most sorely missed in Castiglia's newly energized panoply of great postwar critics is Matthiessen, a gay Marxist visionary whose magnificent study American Renaissance demands renewed attention and cries for rescue from its current moldering position as an archive of reactionary critical values. I also feel that in the end Castiglia has missed a chance here by not more directly engaging with the ideological debates animating Americanist literary criticism of the present. The concerns that several contemporary academics have with historical and ongoing racism and misogyny are not addressed by Castiglia's study. (Academia's intense class bias demands attention that it is rarely ever given, which is the unspoken tension in many of these debates, in my view.) I also contend that there were disturbances and slippages in these critics own understanding of their positions as gay men in McCarthy's America. As I have argued, critics such as Matthiessen and Arvin embraced a kind of death drive in their veneration of patriarchal law as embodied by the faux-virtuous figure of Captain Vere in Melville's gay classic Billy Budd.1What Castiglia does offer is a lively reminder of the eloquent, insightful, and daring critical example of earlier critics. Whether one comes for the hope or for the reminder of this example, one will stay for Castiglia's passionate and rigorous insights into the writings and personal investments of these critics who emulated the American Romantic writers in their germination of a new flowering of American letters in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.