Jo Keroes's scope is wide: she examines the teacher as represented in fiction and film in works ranging from the twelfth-century letters of Abelard and Heloise to contemporary films such as Dangerous Minds and Educating Rita. And from the twelfth through the twentieth century, Keroes shows, the teaching encounter is essentially erotic.
Tracing the roots of eros from cultural as well as psychological perspectives, Keroes defines erotic in terms broader than the merely sexual. She analyzes ways in which teachers serve as convenient figures on whom to map conflicts about gender, power, and desire. To show how portrayals of men and women differ, she examines pairs of texts, using a film or a novel with a woman protagonist (Up the Down Staircase, for example) as counterpoint to one featuring a male teacher (Blackboard Jungle) or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie balanced against Dead Poets Society.
The portrayals of teachers, like all images a culture presents of itself, reveal much about our private and social selves. Keroes points out authentic accounts of authoritative women teachers who are admired and respected by colleagues and students alike. Real teachers differ from the stereotypes we see in fiction and film, however. Male teachers are often portrayed as heroes in film and fallibly human in fiction, whereas women in either genre are likely to be monstrous or muddled and are virtually never women of color. Among other things, Keroes demonstrates, the tension between reality and representation reveals society's ambivalence about power in the hands of women.
In Ten Is the Age of Darkness, Geta LeSeur explores how black authors of the United States and English- speaking Caribbean have taken a European literary tradition and adapted it to fit their own needs for self-expression. LeSeur begins by defining the structure and models of the European genre of the bildungsroman, then proceeds to show how the circumstances of colonialism, oppression, race, class, and gender make the maturing experiences of selected young black protagonists different from those of their white counterparts.
Examining the parallels and differences in attitudes toward childhood in the West Indies and the United States, as well as the writers' individual perspectives in each work of fiction, LeSeur reaches intriguing conclusions about family life, community participation in the nurturing of children, the timing and severity of the youngsters' confrontation of adult society, and the role played by race in the journey toward adulthood.
LeSeur's readings of African American novels provide new insights into the work of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Richard Wright, among others. When read as examples of the bildungsroman rather than simply as chronicles of black experiences, these works reveal an even deeper significance and have a more powerful impact. LeSeur convincingly demonstrates that such African American novels as Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Wright's Black Boy, and Morrison's The Bluest Eye concentrate to a large extent on protest, while such African West Indian works as George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, Austin Clarke's Amongst Thistles and Thorns, Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, and Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home reflect a more naive, healthy re-creation of what childhood can and should be, despite economic and physical impoverishment. She also gives a special space within the genre to Paule Marshall's BrownGirl, Brownstones and Ntozake Shange's Betsey Brown and the importance of "woman time," "woman voice," and mothers.
While enlarging our understanding of both the similarities and the differences in the black experiences of the Carribean and American youngsters coming of age, Ten Is the Age of Darkness also suggests that children of color in similar spheres share many common experiences. LeSeur concludes that the bildungsromane by black writers provide uniquely revealing contributions to the Afro-World literary canon and point the way for others to examine literary pieces in Third World communities of color.
This volume, which examines the special contributions of a number of women mystery writers, sheds light on this significant example of common interests in recreational reading among women and men and the reasons behind the early and continuing uncharacteristic near-equality of both sexes in this field of endeavor.
In his first book devoted exclusively to naturalism, Donald Pizer brings together thirteen essays and four reviews written over a thirty-year period that in their entirety constitute a full-scale interpretation of the basic character and historical shape of naturalism in America.
The essays fall into three groups. Some deal with the full range of American naturalism, from the 1590s to the late twentieth century, and some are confined either to the 1890s or to the twentieth century. In addition to the essays, an introduction in which Pizer recounts the development of his interest in American naturalism, reviews of recent studies of naturalism, and a selected bibliography contribute to an understanding of Pizer’s interpretation of the movement.
One of the recurrent themes in the essays is that the interpretation of American naturalism has been hindered by the common view that the movement is characterized by a commitment to Emile Zola’s deterministic beliefs and that naturalistic novels are thus inevitably crude and simplistic both in theme and method. Rather than accept this notion, Pizer insists that naturalistic novels be read closely not for their success or failure in rendering obvious deterministic beliefs but rather for what actually does occur within the dynamic play of theme and form within the work.
Adopting this method, Pizer finds that naturalistic fiction often reveals a complex and suggestive mix of older humanistic faiths and more recent doubts about human volition, and that it renders this vital thematic ambivalence in increasingly sophisticated forms as the movement matures. In addition, Pizer demonstrates that American naturalism cannot be viewed monolithically as a school with a common body of belief and value. Rather, each generation of American naturalists, as well as major figures within each generation, has responded to threads within the naturalistic impulse in strikingly distinctive ways. And it is indeed this absence of a rigid doctrinal core and the openness of the movement to individual variation that are responsible for the remarkable vitality and longevity of the movement.
Because the essays have their origin in efforts to describe the general characteristics of American naturalism rather than in a desire to cover the field fully, some authors and works are discussed several times (though from different angles) and some referred to only briefly or notat all. But the essays as a collection are "complete" in the sense that they comprise an interpretation of American naturalism both in its various phases and as a whole. Those authors whose works receive substantial discussion include Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James T. Farrell, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Kennedy. Of special interest is Pizer’s essay on Ironweed, which appears here for the first time.
This informative and provocative study focuses on the centrality of departure in the texts of five major American women novelists.
An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political.
Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure—a spectrum anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience.
Through the Window, Out the Door ranges over an expansive territory. Moving between texts as well as between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two. Stout concludes with a personal essay on the dilemmas of domesticity and the ambivalence of departure.
Starting with the figure of the bold, boisterous girl in the mid-19th century and ending with the “girl power” movement of the 1990’s, Tomboys is the first full-length critical study of this gender-bending code of female conduct. Michelle Abate uncovers the origins, charts the trajectory, and traces the literary and cultural transformations that the concept of “tomboy” has undergone in the United States.
Abate focuses on literature including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and films such as Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon and Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes. She also draws onlesser-known texts like E.D.E.N. Southworth's once wildly popular 1859 novel The Hidden Hand, Cold War lesbian pulp fiction, and New Queer Cinema from the 1990s.
Tomboys also explores the gender and sexual dynamics of tomboyism, and offers intriguing discussions of race and ethnicity's role in the construction of the enduring cultural archetype. Abate’s insightful analysis provides useful, thought-provoking connections between different literary works and eras. The result demystifies this cultural phenomenon and challenges readers to consider tomboys in a whole new light.
Since its inception, the United States has been intensely preoccupied with interracialism. The concept is embedded everywhere in our social and political fabric, including our sense of national identity. And yet, in both its quantitative and symbolic forms, interracialism remains an extremely elusive phenomenon, causing policy makers and census boards to wrangle over how to delineate it and, on an emblematic level, stirring intense emotions from fear to fascination.
In The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, Eve Allegra Raimon focuses on the mixed-race female slave in literature, arguing that this figure became a symbolic vehicle for explorations of race and nation—both of which were in crisis in the mid-nineteenth century. At this time, judicial, statutory, social, and scientific debates about the meaning of racial difference (and intermixture) coincided with disputes over frontier expansion, which were never merely about land acquisition but also literally about the “complexion” of that frontier. Embodying both northern and southern ideologies, the “amalgamated” mulatta, the author argues, can be viewed as quintessentially American, a precursor to contemporary motifs of “hybrid” and “mestizo” identities.
Where others have focused on the gendered and racially abject position of the “tragic mulatta,” Raimonreconsiders texts by such central antislavery writers as Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Wilson to suggest that the figure is more usefully examined as a way of understanding the volatile and shifting interface of race and national identity in the antebellum period.
William Scott’s Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. With the rise of mechanization and assembly-line labor from the 1890s to the 1930s, these laborers found that they had been transformed into a class of “mass” workers who, since that time, have been seen alternately as powerless, degraded victims or heroic, empowered icons who could rise above their oppression only through the help of representative organizations located outside the workplace.
Analyzing portrayals of workers in such novels as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Ruth McKenney's Industrial Valley, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel, William Scott moves beyond narrow depictions of these laborers to show their ability to resist exploitation through their direct actions—sit-down strikes, sabotage, and other spontaneous acts of rank-and-file “troublemaking” on the job—often carried out independently of union leadership. The novel of the mass industrial worker invites us to rethink our understanding of modern forms of representation through its attempts to imagine and depict workers’ agency in an environment where it appears to be completely suppressed.
Scorned by critics since birth, decreed dead by many, naturalism, according to Donald Pizer, is “one of the most persistent and vital strains in American fiction, perhaps the only modern literary form in America that has been both popular and significant.”
To define naturalism and explain its tenacious hold throughout the twentieth century on the American creative imagination, Pizer explores six novels: James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.
Pizer’s approach to these novels is empirical; he does not wrench each novel awkwardly until it fits his framework of generalizations and principles; rather, he approaches the novels as fiction and arrives at his definition through his close reading of the works.
Establishing the background of naturalism, Pizer explains that it comes under attack because it is “sordid and sensational in subject matter,” it challenges “man’s faith in his innate moral sense and thus his responsibility for his actions,” and it is so full of “social documentation” that it is often dismissed as little more than a photographic record of a life or an era; thus the “aesthetic validity of the naturalistic novel has often been questioned.”
Pizer posits the 1890s, the 1930s,and the late 1940s as the decades when naturalism flourished in America. He concentrates on literary criticism, not on the philosophy ofnaturalism, to show that literary criticism can make a contribution to a particularly muddled area of literary history—a naturalism that is alive and changing, thus resisting the neat definitions reserved for the dead.
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