Brief Mention

Cosmopolitanism in the Fictive Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois: Toward the Humanization of a Revolutionary Art. By Samuel O. Doku. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2015. xxiii, 190 pp. Cloth, $80.00; e-book, $79.99.Meditating on the expansive horizons of DuBois’s literary and historical imagination, this work outlines DuBois’s cosmopolitan visions. Doku focuses on DuBois’s five novels and early short story “Of the Coming of John” (1903) to argue for an evolution from “classical humanism and Africology” to heterogeneous cosmopolitanisms in his thinking. Critical work by theorists including James Clifford and Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo augment Doku’s formulation of the avant-garde, discrepant, and black cosmopolitanisms that shape DuBois’s intellectual trajectory. This work will be of interest to scholars of African and African American studies, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and modernism.Sex, Power, and the Folly of Marriage in Women’s Novels of the 1920s: A Critical Study of Seven American Writers. By Judy Cornes. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2015. vii, 238 pp. Paper, $39.95; e-book available.Cornes examines the novels of seven US women authors writing in the 1920s: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Margaret Wilson, Edna Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, Dorothy Scarborough, and Dawn Powell. She links biographical and textual insights to argue that these novels demonstrate a shared historical retrospective in their common depiction of nineteenth-century women’s lives. Reading overlapping themes as meditations on how US women “had passed through the nineteenth century,” this text considers how sex, marriage, romance, and power struggles in these works appraise the changing social expectations that shaped women’s lives at the turn of the twentieth century.Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem Renaissance. By Darryl Dickson-Carr. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. 2015. x, 162 pp. Cloth, $39.95; e-book, $38.99.A study of satire in a range of print sources of the Harlem Renaissance, this book examines “iconoclastic” works by George S. Schuyler, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rudolph Fisher from 1919 to 1940. Dickson-Carr tracks how these authors’ use of satire in the shape of lampoon, parody, and irony complicates our understanding of this formative movement’s impact on African American cultural and literary history. A chapter that connects the satirical forms of the Harlem Renaissance to Fran Ross, Ishmael Reed, Percival Everett, and the post-soul aesthetic expands African American literary genealogies.American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building. By Claudia Roth Pierpont. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2016. 309 pp. Cloth, $26.00; e-book, $12.99.In this book of twelve essays Pierpont contemplates the “kaleidoscopic America” constituted by the modernist imaginaries of the artists profiled here. A veteran writer and journalist, Pierpont previously published many of these essays in the New Yorker as a staff writer. This collection assembles these portraits of American artists according to the form of rhapsody, a structure “linked by recurring themes and problems, forming sequences and cycles and sometimes even marking progress.” Essay topics include Edith Wharton, Nina Simone, Bert Williams, Marlon Brando, and other influential twentieth-century figures.Reconstructing Violence: The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature. By Deborah E. Barker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2015. x, 270 pp. $47.50.Reconstructing Violence considers the enduring regional and national imprint of the “southern rape complex,” the influential model of triangulated racial, sexual, and gendered violence advanced by W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941). Following a detailed examination of The Birth of a Nation (1915) as an inaugural site of the complex’s public legibility, Barker traces its subsequent “permutations and variations” in a selection of films and their literary antecedents. Readings of works including The Story of Temple Drake (1933), Sanctuary (1961), and Cape Fear (1962) highlight how the complex continues to form “new filmic, historical, and political figurations” throughout the nation.The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature. By Andrew S. Gross. Heidelberg, DE: Universitätsverlag. 2015. xviii, 262 pp. No price available.This work argues that the contentious 1949 inaugural award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound limns the complex tensions between poetic lyricism and political liberalism in American cultural life during the mid-twentieth century. Delineating the Cold War “liberal aesthetic” that occasioned Pound’s award, Gross evaluates the political and aesthetic stakes of debates concerning the personal and the political in lyric poetry. Chapters on Allen Ginsberg, Karl Shapiro, W. H. Auden, Peter Viereck, Katherine Anne Porter and Leslie Fiedler, and John Berryman elaborate the subsequent emergence of “alternate lyricisms” throughout the later twentieth century.The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period. By David Cowart. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 2015. xii, 258 pp. Cloth, $80.00; paper, $32.95; e-book available.In this study of postmodern American fiction, Cowart deliberates on the question of “what differentiates the writers who came to prominence in the 1960s from the succeeding generation or generations.” Cowart surveys ten novels published at the turn of the twenty-first century to elucidate how the notion of generation shapes theoretical continuities and challenges to the postmodern novel and author. Situating these current novels within the formal and social influences of “first generation” postmodern authors such as William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, The Tribe of Pyn suggests that these contemporary authors “work fresh veins in a postmodern mine.”Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War. By Philipp Löffler. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2015. 182 pp. Cloth, $85.00; e-book available.Focusing on historical novels written in the 1990s through the 2000s, this study of post–Cold War US literary culture argues that “the contemporary historical novel reflects and endorses a pluralistic reading of the world.” Löffler reads works by four contemporary novelists—Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Richard Powers—as the “end point” of a longer continuum toward “replacing universal models of history with particularist ones.” To this end, Löffler provides a genealogy of cultural pluralist thought in the United States, outlining the resonant historical influences of Friedrich Nietzsche and William James.A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht. By Jonathan F. S. Post. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2015. xviii, 294 pp. $35.00.In a broad survey of the works of poet and critic Anthony Hecht, Post fuses formal inquiry with biographical context and Hecht’s own archival materials to compose an overview of Hecht’s career with a “chronological cast.” Chapters vary in scale from detailed analyses of single poems to broad themes in Hecht’s poetry (including war, art, and ekphrasis) and Hecht’s enduring interest in Shakespeare. Drawing on the poet’s letters, contemporary reviews, and critical writings, A Thickness of Particulars will be of interest to both poets and scholars of twentieth-century American poetry and poetics.Writing West Virginia: Place, People, and Poverty in Contemporary Literature from the Mountain State. By Boyd Creasman. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press. 2016. 183 pp. $39.95.In this review of contemporary West Virginian literature, Creasman examines themes of “place, socio-economic class, and gender,” arguing that “characters can transcend limitations related to these themes through three types of transcendence.” From Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter to recent works by Ann Pancake and Pinckney Benedict, Writing West Virginia considers a spectrum of postwar to contemporary novels, short fiction, and poetry by eight authors. This work will be of particular interest to scholars of Appalachian studies, regional writing, and US Southern literary studies.Of Bodies, Communities, and Voices: Agency in Writings by Octavia Butler. By Florian Bast. Heidelberg, DE: Universitätsverlag. 2015. 238 pp. No price available.Reflective of the swelling critical interest in African American speculative fiction, and in Octavia Butler in particular, this work focuses on agency in five of Butler’s novels and one short story. Bast attends to the work that Butler’s fiction does toward “conceptualizing agency” as embodied and relational, and to the texts’ direct “usage and explorations of specific agential acts” in the practice of first-person narration. Reading Butler’s work as both theory and praxis, Bast argues that Butler’s narratives “construct not one single, coherent, and harmonious notion but a complex conversation.”Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination. By Kathy-Ann Tan. Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press. 2015. x, 364 pp. Cloth, $64.99; e-book available.Calling for a “reorientation of dominant understandings of nationhood, citizenship, national identity, and national literature(s),” this sizable work explores alternative configurations of transnational, postnational, and diasporic belongings that challenge governing modes of national identity in North America. Assembling a broad spectrum of US and Canadian literary texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, Tan adopts a multiperspective synchronic approach over a linear methodology in this study. Reading disparate texts across historical and geographic boundaries brings a spectrum of alternative formations into relief as Reconfiguring Citizenship focuses on unpatriotic, stateless or undocumented, queer, unnaturalized, and indigenous bodies.

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