AMERICAN LITERATURE最新文献

{"title":"Ella Rhoads Higginson","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0219","url":null,"abstract":"Ella Rhoads Higginson (b. 1862?–d. 1940) was born in Council Grove, Kansas, a launching point for westward movement of settler colonialists. When she was a child, her family moved to Oregon, traveling in a wagon train following the old Oregon Trail. The family eventually settled in Oregon City, where she was educated in private school. Ella’s strong interests in reading and writing began early. Her parents possessed a substantial library that included books by Irving, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Ella began writing when she was eight. Her first publication, the poem “Dreams of the Past,” appeared in The Oregon City newspaper when she was fourteen. The following year she began work on The Oregon City Enterprise newspaper, learning typesetting and editorial writing. She also started publishing fiction. In 1885, she married Russell Carden Higginson, a businessman who was a cousin to New England author Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The couple moved north to Whatcom (later Bellingham), Washington, where Higginson lived for fifty-two years until her death. There she devoted herself to writing. She soon became the first influential Pacific Northwest author. People around the world were introduced to the region when they read Higginson’s award-winning writing. Her descriptions of majestic mountains, vast forests, and the scenic waters of the Puget Sound presented the then-remote, unfamiliar Pacific Northwest to eager readers. Her characterizations of white women and men who inhabited the region revealed what life was like in this part of the nation as opposed to regions such as New England. Higginson’s celebrated writings were the first to place the Pacific Northwest on the literary map. Her talent was widely recognized. The prestigious Macmillan Company, which became her publisher, approached her seeking to print her work. She was awarded prizes from magazines such as Collier’s and McClure’s. Her poems were set to music and performed internationally. She published over eight hundred works in her lifetime. However, World War I altered the means of production, resulting in books going out of print and diminishing reputations of well-known authors, especially writers of color and women. Most of Higginson’s books went out of print. After the war, new editors, mostly white men, managed US newspapers, periodicals, and publishing companies. Largely uninterested in prewar authors, they sought writing from nascent literary movements such as Modernism while also promoting works by overlooked white male authors such as Melville. Higginson’s reputation faded in the last decades of her life. By the time she was chosen first Poet Laureate of Washington State in 1931, she and her work were largely remembered only in the Pacific Northwest. When she died in 1940, she was almost completely forgotten. In the 21st century, Higginson and her writings are returning to literary distinction.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48173026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Jack In, Young Pioneer”: Frontier Politics, Ecological Entrapment, and the Architecture of Cyberspace","authors":"Suzanne F. Boswell","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361251","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay uncovers the environmental and historical conditions that played a role in cyberspace’s popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Tracing both fictional and critical constructions of cyberspace in a roughly twenty-year period from the publication of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (1984–1988) to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, this essay argues that cyberspace’s infinite, virtual territory provided a solution to the apparent ecological crisis of the 1980s: the fear that the United States was running out of physical room to expand due to overdevelopment. By discursively transforming the technology of cyberspace into an “electronic frontier,” technologists, lobbyists, and journalists turned cyberspace into a solution for the apparent American crisis of overdevelopment and resource loss. In a period when Americans felt detached from their own environment, cyberspace became a new frontier for exploration and a so-called American space to which the white user belonged as an indigenous inhabitant. Even Gibson’s critique of the sovereign cyberspace user in the Sprawl trilogy masks the violence of cybercolonialism by privileging the white American user. Sprawl portrays the impossibility of escaping overdevelopment through cyberspace, but it routes this impossibility through the specter of racial contamination by Caribbean hackers and Haitian gods. This racialized frontier imaginary shaped the form of internet technologies throughout the 1990s, influencing the modern user’s experience of the internet as a private space under their sovereign control. In turn, the individualism of the internet experience restricts our ability to create collective responses to the climate crisis, encouraging internet users to see themselves as disassociated from conditions of environmental and social catastrophe.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42703968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century","authors":"Andrew Kopec","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361223","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow’s early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism—and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau’s celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle’s recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal—this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure’s long—that is, low—relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle’s case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life “after” infrastructure.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44424608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels","authors":"R. Evans","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361265","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory: a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes in which postplantation spaces in the US South are imbued with temporal slippages such that past and present meet through the built environment. Tracing the plantation’s environmental and infrastructural presence in the Gulf Coast and throughout the US South, this essay argues that the plantation’s presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come into uneasy contact. Further, geomemory’s particular enmeshment with spatial design and infrastructure means that it moves from identifying the modern afterlife of the plantation to situating the present in the long context of plantation modernity.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44763303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual RealmModernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American LiteratureGears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America","authors":"Carol Colatrella","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361307","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47718154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Subsident Gulf: Refiguring Climate Change in Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage","authors":"Kelly Mckisson","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361279","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article focuses on figures of subsidence in Jesmyn Ward’s novels of Bois Sauvage. Subsidence not only describes an actual process of sinking land in the US Gulf Coast bioregion but also refigures how those who study climate change can understand and address its material effects. A focus on subsidence makes visible the sometimes-invisible infrastructure of the ground, and analysis scaled to the figure of subsidence forces a reorientation of vision—away from rising sea levels and toward the destabilizing loss of land. From this perspective, Ward’s fiction identifies histories of colonial engineering, extraction, and displacement as key ecological dangers. Unsettling national narratives of the Gulf Coast, Ward’s subsident figurations connect issues of environmental emergency to structures of environmental racism, which unevenly enhance the precarity of certain communities by diminishing the ecological infrastructures of their lands. This article argues that literary fiction can produce new understandings of situated environmental challenges and can pose particular obligations for environmental justice.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46457616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit","authors":"M. Huang","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361293","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Illuminating how biomedical capital invests in white and Asian American populations while divesting from Black surplus populations, this article proposes recent Asian American dystopian fiction provides a case study for analyzing futurities where healthcare infrastructures intensify racial inequality under terms that do not include race at all. Through a reading of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and other texts, the article develops the term studious deracination to refer to a narrative strategy defined by an evacuated racial consciousness that is used to ironize assumptions of white universalism and uncritical postracialism. Studious deracination challenges medical discourse’s “color-blind” approach to healthcare and enables a reconsideration of comparative racialization in a moment of accelerating social disintegration and blasted landscapes. Indeed, while precision medicine promises to replace race with genomics, Asian American literature is key to showing how this “postracial” promise depends on framing racial inequality as a symptom, rather than an underlying etiology, of infrastructures of public health.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66737913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Hard-Boiled Anthropocene and the Infrastructure of Extractivism","authors":"J. Rowan","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361237","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay suggests that hard-boiled crime fiction in the United States has developed the kind of “deep infrastructural ethic” that John Durham Peters says is present in much modern thought. The essay attempts to illuminate the genre’s infrastructural ethic and its corresponding affordance for environmental critique by tracing its expressions through a sample of significant texts in the hard-boiled and noir canons, and by concluding with a sustained reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015). These readings demonstrate that hard-boiled narratives enable readers to perceive the ways in which extractivist infrastructures are frequently built upon and facilitate the exploitation of both human and environmental resources. Hard-boiled texts help readers see capitalism’s extractivist infrastructure as a type of material and intellectual entrapment that ultimately undermines the common good and the planetary commons. Further, this essay argues that hard-boiled crime fiction attends to what AbdouMaliq Simone calls “infrastructures of relationality” and thus points a way out of the material and metaphysical entrapments of an extractivist economy’s infrastructure. The infrastructures of relationality that emerge in a world in which climate crises have broken down the infrastructures of capitalism provide a platform from which individuals can practice a mode of collective thinking and being that offers an alternative to the alienation upon which extractivism depends. In short, the hard-boiled genre is not only one of the Anthropocene’s earliest cultural responders but is also a vital genre for making sense of our contemporary situation in a deeper stage of the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48281275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"White Writers, Race Matters: Fictions of Racial Liberalism from Stowe to StockettBlack Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery","authors":"Chris Taylor","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361321","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44229555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: The Infrastructure of Emergency","authors":"Jessica Hurley, J. Insko","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9361209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361209","url":null,"abstract":"On July 16, 1979, the largest radiological disaster in United States history took place in New Mexico when the failure of a tailings dam at the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock uranium mill led to the release of 1,100 tons of radioactive mill waste and 95 million gallons of highly acidic, highly radioactive liquid effluent into Pipeline Arroyo, from where it entered the Río Puerco. Following its course though the Navajo Nation, the irradiated river left radiotoxic sediments and radioactive groundwater in wells and aquifers across Dinétah. Built on land known to be geologically unsound and displaying large cracks as early as 1977, the dam was known by both the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) and the state and federal agencies that had granted its construction license to be an unstable infrastructure on shaky ground (Brugge, deLemos, and Bui 2011). But this was Navajo ground, and the violence was slow, and the mill produced $200,000 in yellowcake per day, and so the risk of catastrophe was ignored until it was actualized—at which point it was essentially ignored again, overshadowed by the Three Mile Island release that had occurred four months earlier, which had been more spectacular and impacted mostly white settlers rather than Diné. Desultory cleanup efforts by first the UNC and then the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have left the area widely contaminated; as of January 2021, “groundwater migration is not under control” (EPA n.d.).1 The devastating health effects of long-term exposure to radiotoxins continue to impact the Navajo Nation, where they both compound and are compounded by the social and bodily harms of life lived under colonial occupation (Voyles 2015: 4). Thirty years later and 1,500 miles away, the most expensive inland","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47947942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}