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Gothic to Multicultural.
Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction.
LEE, A. Robert
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2009, 543 pp.
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Series:
Costerus NS 178
In this group of loosely connected essays traces the evolution of distinctly American writing from the Revolutionary period to the present. While he makes use of the work of the standard exemplars, Hawthorne, Poe, Cooper, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Lee looks at them in terms of America's view of itself and its history. For this reason, he often selects lesser-known stories to examine. Part of the change Lee notes is the growing respect for women as serious novelists and the various reflections of African American and Native American experiences. The article on Native Americans moves from their representation in books and films by non-Natives to writers who come from the culture. An interesting chapter on Wharton's /Age of Innocence/ and Martin Scorsese's film adaptation of it stresses the way in which our national self-perception has changed. Lee's style is clear and flowing, refreshingly free of literary jargon.
Book News Inc. , Portland, 2009
Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction, twenty-three essays each carefully revised from the past four decades, explores both range and individual register. The collection opens with considerations of gothic as light and dark in Charles Brockden Brown, war and peace in Cooper’s The Spy, Antarctica as world-genesis in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the link of “The Custom House” and main text in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, reflexive codings in Melville’s Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man, Henry James’ Hawthorne as self-mirroring biography, and Stephen Crane’s working of his Civil War episode in The Red Badge of Courage. Two composite lineages address apocalypse in African American fiction and landscape in women’s authorship from Sarah Orne Jewett to Leslie Marmon Silko. There follow culture and anarchy in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima, text-into-film in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, modernist stylings in Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, and roman noir in Cornell Woolrich. The collection then turns to the limitations of protest categorization for Richard Wright and Chester Himes, autofiction in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the novel of ideas in Robert Penn Warren’s late fiction. Three closing essays take up multicultural genealogy, Harlem, then the Black South, in African American fiction, and the reclamation of voice in Native American fiction.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Pathways, Bearings
1. A Darkness Visible: Gothic and the Case of Charles Brockden Brown
2. Making History, Making Fiction: Cooper’s The Spy
3. Impudent and Ingenious Fiction: Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
4. Like a Dream Behind Me: Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter
5. The Mirrors of Biography, The Mirrors of Fiction: Henry James’ Hawthorne
6. Moby-Dick as Anatomy
7. Voices Off, On, and Beyond: Ventriloquy in The Confidence-Man
8. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: The Novella as Moving Box
9. Hell’s Loose: Apocalypse in the Early and Modern African American Novel
10. Woman’s Place? The Landscapes of Jewett, Chopin, Cather, Hurston, Welty, Chávez, Yamashita, Silko
11. Odd Man Out? Henry James, The Canon and The Princess Casamassima
12. Watching Manners: Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
13. A Quality of Distortion: Imagining The Great Gatsby
14. Everything Completely Knit Up: Seeing For Whom the Bell Tolls Whole
15. Modernist Faulkner? A Yoknapatawpha Trilogy
16. The View from the Rear Window: The Fiction of Cornell Woolrich
17. Richard Wright’s Inside Narratives
18. Violence Become a Form: The Novels of Chester Himes
19. Flunking Everything Else Except English Anyway: Holden Caulfield, Author
20. The Place We Have Come To: The Late Fiction of Robert Penn Warren
21. Harlem on My Mind: Fictions of a Black Metropolis
22. Down Home: Mapping The South in Contemporary African American Fiction
23. I Am Your Worst Nightmare: I Am an Indian with a Pen – Fictions of the Indian, Native Fictions
Index
A. Robert Lee is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, having previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998), Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award for 2004, Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), and United States: Re-viewing Multicultural American Literature (2008).
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