An unprecedented examination of class-bridging reform and U.S. literary history at the turn of the twentieth century
 

Reading for Reform rewrites the literary history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America by putting social reform institutions at the center of literary and cultural analysis. Examining the vibrant, often fractious literary cultures that developed as part of the Progressive mandate to uplift the socially disadvantaged, it shows that in these years reformers saw literature as a way to combat the myriad social problems that plagued modern U.S. society. As they developed distinctly literary methods for Americanizing immigrants, uplifting and refining wage-earning women, and educating black students, their institutions gave rise to a new social purpose for literature.

Class-bridging reform institutions—the urban settlement house, working girls’ club, and African American college—are rarely addressed in literary history. Yet, Laura R. Fisher argues, they engendered important experiments in the form and social utility of American literature, from minor texts of Yiddish drama and little-known periodical and reform writers to the fiction of Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen. Fisher delves into reform’s vast and largely unexplored institutional archives to show how dynamic sites of modern literary culture developed at the margins of social power. 

Fisher reveals how reformist approaches to race, class, religion, and gender formation shaped American literature between the 1880s and the 1920s. In doing so, she tells a new story about the fate of literary practice, and the idea of literature’s practical value, during the very years that modernist authors were proclaiming art’s autonomy from concepts of social utility. 

Redrawing the Lines was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Since 1970 literary theory has experienced a period of rich interaction with both Anglo-American analytic and Continental philosophy, particularly deconstruction. Yet these two philosophical schools have regarded each other with hostility, if at all, as in the 1977 exchange between John Searle and Jacques Derrida over the work of J. L. Austin. Since then, the two philosophical traditions have begun to interact as each has influenced literary theory, and some suggest that they are not diametrically opposed.

Redrawing the Lines,the first book to focus on that interaction, brings together ten essays by key figures who have worked to connect literary theory and philosophy and to reassess the relationship between analytic and Continental philosophy. The editor's introduction establishes the debate's historical context, and his annotated bibliography directs the interested reader to virtually everything written on this issue.

The contributors: Reed Way Dasenbrock, Henry Staten, Michael Fischer, Charles Altieri, Richard Shusterman, Samuel C. Wheeler III, Jules David Law, Steven Winspur, Christopher Norris, Richard Rorty, and Anthony J. Cascardi.

Reed Way Dasenbrock is associate professor of English at New Mexico State University. He is the author of The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Toward the Condition of Painting.

Reproductions of Banality was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

An established fascist state has never existed in France, and after World War II there was a tendency to blame the Nazi Occupation for the presence of fascists within the country. Yet the memory of fascism within their ranks still haunts French intellectuals, and questions about a French version of fascist ideology have returned to the political forefront again and again in the years since the war. In Reproductions of Banality, Alice Yaegar Kaplan investigates the development of fascist ideology as it was manifested in the culture of prewar and Occupied France. Precisely because it existed only in a "gathering" or formative stage, and never achieved the power that brings with it a bureaucratic state apparatus, French fascism never lost its utopian, communal elements, or its consequent aesthetic appeal. Kaplan weighs this fascist aesthetic and its puzzling power of attraction by looking closely at its material remains: the narratives, slogans, newspapers, and film criticism produced by a group of writers who worked in Paris in the 1930s and early 1940s — their "most real moment."