The contributors to Individual and Community attempt to illuminate aspects of the individual-community relationship. Though different in focus and approach, the essays themselves express a "community" of concern, a concern which includes not just the situations of characters in fictional worlds, but one which touches the relationship of both novelists and reader to a world of words.
The essays are intended to point to the continuity of an important theme in American fiction and to offer insight into the variety of philosophical and literary strategies utilized in significant works of significant authors in dealing with the question of the individual and the community.

Intertextual encounters occur whenever an author or the author’s text recognizes, references, alludes to, imitates, parodies, or otherwise elicits an audience member’s familiarity with other texts. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West use the fiction of Horatio Alger, Jr., as an intertext in their novels, The Great Gatsby and A Cool Million. Callie Khouri and Ridley Scott use the buddy-road-picture genre as an intertext for their Thelma and Louise. In all these cases, intertextual encounters take place between artists, between texts, between texts and audiences, between artists and audiences. Michael Dunne investigates works from the 1830s to the 1990s and from the canonical American novel to Bugs Bunny and Jerry Seinfeld.

The many popular representations of student life at women’s colleges produced in the United States during the Progressive Era are examined. The college woman was described and defined in a period when women’s higher education was still socially suspect.
    While other scholars have argued that the Progressive Era was the “golden age” for women’s single-sex education, pointing to the many positive depictions of the women’s college student, Inness suggests that these representations actually helped to perpetuate the status quo and did little to advance women’s social rights.

Intricate Relations charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers: sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789 and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler recreates and illuminates the larger, sometimes opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read.

In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase “intricate relations” to describe the complex imbrication of sexual and economic relations in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief job of the “moral historian,” a label that most novelists of the era embraced. In a republic anxious about burgeoning individualism in the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the novel foregrounded sexual and economic desires and explored ways to regulate the manner in which they were expressed and gratified.

In Intricate Relations, Weyler argues that understanding how these issues underlie the novel as a genre is fundamental to understanding both the novels themselves and their role in American literary culture. Situating fiction amid other popular genres illuminates how novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Samuel Relf, Susanna Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Sally Wood synthesized and iterated many of the concerns expressed in other forms of public discourse, a strategy that helped legitimate their chosen genre and make it a viable venue for discussion in the decades following the revolution.

Weyler’s passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary theorists and scholars in women’s and American studies.

Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers "disappeared" after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.

In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer's troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen's life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.

With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer's connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major i mpact on African American literary studies.