Brief Mention

Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America. By Sara L. Crosby. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press. 2016. 223 pp. Paper, $65.00; e-book, $65.00.Poison, women, and popular writing have long been associated in European culture, as the trope of the poisonous woman disparaged unauthorized writing and those who read it. Crosby analyzes newsprint, trial transcripts, pamphlets, novels, plays, and poems to demonstrate that the female poisoner was depicted in more conflicting and occasionally positive terms in the United States than in Europe. The book explores two major types of female poisoners: the romantic poisoner, depicted by John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe, and the democratic poisoner, depicted by Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Lippard.Dismantling Slavery: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Formation of the Abolitionist Discourse, 1841–1851. By Nilgün Anadolu-Okur. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press. 2016. xii, 330 pp. Cloth, $60.00.Although scholarship of the abolition movement is robust, scholars tend to overlook the friendship between Douglass and Garrison. This book foregrounds that friendship, arguing, “Through the stages of an extraordinary partnership between Garrison and Douglass, the antislavery mobilization was accelerated reaching its height between 1841 and 1851.” Their discourse spawned numerous journal essays, newspaper editorials, diaries, letters, poems, plays, autobiographies, and novels. Anadolu-Okur’s chapters cover the beginning of Douglass and Garrison’s alliance, the expansion of slavery, a close reading of literary works, the role of women as author-activists, and the events that finally led to the dissolution of the alliance between these two famous abolitionists.Two Cities: The Political Thought of American Transcendentalism. By Daniel S. Malachuk. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas. 2016. xiv, 298 pp. Cloth, $39.95.With the ages of revolution and romanticism overlapping in the eighteenth century, politics and the personal became highly entangled. Focusing on 1850s writings by transcendentalists, Malachuk asserts that the nineteenth-century attempt to separate democracy and individuality began in Concord, Massachusetts. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau sought to separate democracy and the sacred person into two distinct realms, or “two cities.” Aside from its main focus on antebellum US thought, this book also addresses present-day concerns, in particular the postsecular critique of Western political theory.The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire. By Todd Nathan Thompson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. 2015. xii, 178 pp. Cloth, $29.50; e-book available.Although many scholars have noted Lincoln’s predilection for humor, few have called him a satirist. Arguing that Lincoln was “adept not only at using satire but also at deflecting it,” Thompson analyzes the dialectic between the president’s use of satire and the way satirical works depicted him. Exploring political cartoons, periodicals, jokebooks, and campaign literature, Thompson examines the way Lincoln shifted jokes from the realm of humor into the realm of satire by using apolitical stories allegorically to describe political situations. Chapters cover topics such as the way media portrayed Lincoln’s appearance and the way he used self-effacing modesty and satirical attack in his own writings.The Introspective Art of Mark Twain. By Douglas Anderson. New York: Bloomsbury. 2017. xiii, 278 pp. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $29.95; e-book, $25.99.Enlisting Twain’s relatively understudied 1906 work What Is Man? as a literary touchstone, Anderson explores the author’s preoccupation with inner consciousness. Through close readings of earlier works such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Tom Sawyer (1876), the book examines Twain’s oeuvre with attention to philosophical questions of aesthetics, introspection, and the source of creative expression. This work will be of particular interest to Twain scholars, especially those unfamiliar with his later writings.Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920–1940. By Lorraine Elena Roses. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 2017. xiii, 227 pp. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $28.95.While the Harlem Renaissance has inspired decades of scholarly research, the cultural productions of interwar Boston have been largely overlooked. Hoping to fill this gap, Roses argues for a “Boston renascence,” distinct from its Harlem contemporary in demographics, material resources, and accomplishments. During this time when black Boston had little electoral sway, its leaders harnessed the power of cultural capital to traverse racial divides. After locating the geographic contours of black Boston, Roses covers such subjects as class and family, woman art organizers, and the cultural capital of black theater.Booker T. Washington in American Memory. By Kenneth M. Hamilton. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2017. ix, 250 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $24.95; e-book, $22.46.Since the 1960s, historical accounts of Booker T. Washington have problematized his influence on African American progress, especially with regard to his attitudes toward racial segregation. In this literary history of Washington’s legacy, specifically the months following his death in 1915, Hamilton complicates this narrative. He enlists archival research to contextualize how white and black Americans privately and publicly honored the memory of a man who, while born in the South, exemplified a “Yankee Protestant ethic.”E. E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza. By J. Alison Rosenblitt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 2016. xxii, 370 pp. Cloth, $100.00.This study reframes our understanding of e. e. cummings by zeroing in on the modernist poet’s deep and sustained engagement with the classical tradition. The first part of the book examines the historical influence of World War I (in which he served in 1917) and the literary influence of writers such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus (all of whom he translated). Rosenblitt argues that cummings must be read as a classicizing poet as well as a modernist one.Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. By Maren Tova Linett. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 2017. viii, 257 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $34.95; e-book available.This study examines transatlantic modernist writers through the lens of literary disability studies—or, in Linett’s words, the “cultural constructions and metaphoric uses of disability within artistic representations.” Enlisting works by both canonical and noncanonical writers, Linett argues that, in its quest to break with past literary forms, modernism heavily depended on symbolic uses of disabled bodies. Through analysis of works ranging from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), this project theorizes that the othering of disabled bodies left a deep literary imprint on modernism on both sides of the Atlantic.Legends Never Die: Athletes and Their Afterlives in Modern America. By Richard Ian Kimball. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press. 2017. xii, 201 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.95, e-book available.After sports heroes die, reporters, artists, companies, and fans respond in a number of ways, freezing time within monuments and festivals, or what Pierre Nora calls “sites of memory.” This book focuses on case studies of famous athletes who died young, examining especially the post–World War II generation and arguing that “modern sports help Americans to suppress the fears associated with their own mortality.” Chapters trace the afterlives of such athletes as Lou Gehrig, George Gipp, Bonnie McCarroll, Lane Frost, Benny Paret, Dale Earnhardt, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams.Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman. By Harriet Pollack. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2016. xiii, 284 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Drawing from an approach that sees the white female body as a symbol for the Southern body politic, this monograph traces a thematic pattern in Welty’s fiction: the way in which a sheltered, middle-class, white female protagonist takes pleasure in an other-class woman’s making a “spectacle” of herself. Through close readings of Welty’s work—as well as her photography’s representations of the black female body—Pollack explores what she calls the “puzzle of this repetition” in the symbolic exposures of women’s corporeal selves. This work will be of special interest to scholars of women’s studies, Southern studies, and American studies.Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. By Michial Farmer. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2017. vi, 228 pp. Cloth, $90.00; e-book, $24.99.This book argues that, as an author who sees himself as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s successor, John Updike also shares Hawthorne’s “view of the potential of the human imagination for good and for evil, and many of his fictional works are explicitly or implicitly explorations of the issue.” Farmer engages with existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard to analyze such novels as The Centaur (1963), Of the Farm (1965), Couples (1968), Marry Me: A Romance (1976), and Updike’s trilogy adapting Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative. By Ruth Mackay. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2016. xi, 255 pp. Cloth, $92.95; e-book, $19.95.This book is marked by two events, one horizontal and one vertical: the end of westward expansion into the frontier, as marked by the 1890 US census, and the vertical collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. As the idea of endless westward expansion collapsed in 1890, Mackay argues, “narrative attention turned toward the verticality of skyscrapers, aviation, drilling, and mining.” After 9/11, representations of the vertical were associated with anxiety and trauma. In five chapters, she explores this theme through the work of Winsor McCay, Upton Sinclair, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allen Ginsberg, and Philippe Petit.Toward Diversity and Emancipation: (Re-)Narrating Space in the Contemporary American Novel. By Marcel Thoene. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag. 2016. 335 pp. Paper, $50.00.Narratives are often seen as unfolding through time. What gets lost in this view, Thoene points out, is space. Thoene argues that “it is primarily space that underlies (particularly contemporary) U.S.-American literary narratives,” in content, aesthetic, and characters. He analyzes how novels both acknowledge how crucial space is within US discourse and challenge such hegemonic space myths as dominance, expansion, and exceptionalism. Focusing on the redefinition of myth, the book interprets Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2003); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998); Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North (2009); and Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995).The American Biographical Novel. By Michael Lackey. New York: Bloomsbury. 2016. ix, 278 pp. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $29.95; e-book, $25.99.This monograph charts the literary history of the biographical novel in terms of its reception in the literary establishment and among the general reading public. Lackey engages in a series of close readings of works, including William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1964), Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1997). By mapping the reception and patterns in the genre, Lackey argues that biographical novelists often privilege symbolic representation over historical or biographical fact, offering a certain kind of “truth” (or even what he calls “dual-temporal truths”).Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry: John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman. By Elina Siltanen. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. 2016. x, 210 pp. Cloth, $135.00; e-book, $135.00.When responding to poetry, critics tend to focus on a text’s complexity rather than the process of reading. But these poets sought not only new ways of writing but also new ways of reading by decentralizing voice and presence. Thus, Siltanen argues, “poems, in and of themselves, contain and suggest methods for the reading of them.” Her chapters explore such topics as how reading communities are created, how writers combine poetry with criticism, and how poetry shares the language of common communication.Embroidering the Scarlet A: Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film. By Janet Mason Ellerby. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 2015. xii, 277 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $34.95; e-book, $34.95.Ellerby sees her book as “following a red thread through the elaborate and wide-ranging tapestry” of US culture, from early American novels to the film Easy A. Locating characters akin to Hester Prynne throughout this range, Ellerby uses reader-response and feminist theories to craft a highly autobiographical critical work that reflects on her own experience as an unwed mother. Organized chronologically and topically, the book begins with such early novels as The Power of Sympathy (1789), The Coquette (1797), and Charlotte Temple (1797) and goes on to cover such authors as Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, and Alice Walker.A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy. By Petra Mundik. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press. 2016. vi, 426 pp. Cloth, $65.00.Mundik turns her attention to six of McCarthy’s later novels, with particular emphasis on Blood Meridian (1985) and The Crossing (1994). This literary study investigates the nature of the metaphysical and its intersections with theodicy in McCarthy’s work. Mundik focuses most closely on the strains of Gnosticism (a system of thought that perceives the cosmos as evil) and perennial philosophy (which seeks the common factor in “esoteric religions”).James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity. By Aaron Ngozi Oforlea. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2017. xi, 241 pp. Cloth, $84.95; e-book, $19.95.This study of Baldwin’s and Morrison’s work explores how black male characters cross what Oforlea calls the “discursive divide” by moving from the position of “object of discourse to empowered agent.” Through its meditations on several major works, including Beloved (1987), Go Tell It on the Mountain (1963), and Song of Solomon (1977), the book illuminates the rhetorics of black male subjectivities, particularly in terms of characters’ strategic negotiations of race, sexuality, gender, and class. Oforlea demonstrates how Baldwin and Morrison invite an exploration of storytelling as an act of collective resistance against societal forces of racial oppression.Journeys and Journals: Women’s Mystery Writing and Migration in the African Diaspora. By Carol Allen. New York: Peter Lang. 2017. 198 pp. Cloth, $89.95; e-book available.Allen situates the genre of black women’s detective writing in relation to patterns of migration (ranging from the slave trade to the Great Migration) within the African diaspora. The book postulates that, unlike their white counterparts, black women mystery writers have focused less on the psyches of the criminals than on the environments that give rise to crime. The detectives of these novels, Allen argues, grapple with philosophical quandaries and intellectual riddles whose implications reverberate across society. This work will be of special interest to scholars of detective fiction, African American studies, and women’s studies.Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas. By Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press. 2016. xii, 301 pp. Cloth, $95.00; e-book, $74.99.This monograph explores what Tosta calls “confluence narratives,” a subgenre of historical novels that “examine the national identities of American nations based on one or more of their cultural encounters.” By examining several contemporary novels—including Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), and Nélida Piñon’s A república dos sonhos (1984)—Tosta intervenes in the field of twentieth-century inter-American studies, with particular attention to the inclusion of Brazil. The study reveals how factors such as immigration, slavery, and colonization have inextricably linked nations throughout the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, thus making confluence narratives an inherently inter-American genre.Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels. By Jean Wyatt. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2017. x, 233 pp. Cloth, $74.95; paper, $29.95; e-book, $29.95.“The structure is the argument,” Toni Morrison once said. Accordingly, Wyatt traces the shapeshifting forms of love in Morrison’s later work. Through the lenses of psychoanalysis and Wyatt analyzes the and in Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise A and the Wyatt that these Morrison’s in a a as an between and This book will be of particular interest to scholars of novel women’s studies, and African American African American and the of in as a for By E. 2016. 277 pp. Cloth, paper, e-book, study explores in the of 9/11, African American novels and of in an national that and black works by authors such as Daniel and how these novels a black privilege the and of as In these works of critique the idea of and of resistance for David New York: Bloomsbury. 2017. vi, pp. Cloth, $120.00; e-book, James a distinct for to his writings for the first as a and he many his that be to to This of a by the book into two as the The first his most works, from The of in 1890 to in in The analyzes the way James modernist writers such as Frost, James and Marcel

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