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Many scholars have written about the white readers and patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, but during the period many black writers, publishers, and editors worked to foster a cadre of African American readers, or in the poet Sterling Brown's words, a “reading folk.” Black newspapers featured columns that reviewed the latest African American fiction. Magazines held writing contests to urge black readers to participate in the literary culture. Through newspapers, journals, and anthologies, writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett spoke directly to their fellow African Americans to cultivate interest in literature and the intellectual tools for reading it.

In The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader, Shawn Anthony Christian argues that print-based addresses to African Americans are a defining but understudied component of the Harlem Renaissance. Especially between 1919 and 1930, these writers promoted diverse racial representation as a characteristic of “good literature” both to exhibit black literacy and to foster black readership. Drawing on research from print culture studies, histories of racial uplift, and studies of modernism, Christian demonstrates the importance of this focus on the African American reader in influential periodicals such as The Crisis and celebrated anthologies such as The New Negro. Christian illustrates that the drive to develop and support black readers was central in the poetry, fiction, and drama of the era.

"The Huron River . . . was called 'Cos-scut-e-nong Sebee'. . . . [It] is a beautiful, transparent stream, passing alternatively through rich bottoms, openings, plains, and sloping woodlands, covered with heavy timber."
---History of Washtenaw County, Michigan, 1881

The Huron River---stretching 130 miles through three counties---has inspired numerous writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contained here is a collection of new poems, essays, and stories, accompanied by maps, photographs, and illustrations that celebrate the Huron River. Over twenty locally and nationally known literary figures, including Alice Fulton and Charles Baxter, have contributed to this volume. In addition, the work of biologists, naturalists, and even an arche-ologist have been included to give a richer sense of the physical and cultural environment.

Each of these writers reminds us that our lives are more intertwined with the river and its watershed than we might think. The Huron River opens with these words: "Watersheds are the oldest and most durable markers of place. . . . These boundaries affect our lives by defining our natural environment, not only its topography but its soils, its plant and animal life, and to some extent its weather. The water that sustains most of us is the water that flows through our local watershed."

And the river's strength is wondrous unto itself. "The water will always be there, and it will always find its way down," writer Gary Snyder tells us. The river is sometimes visible, sometimes not; yet it "is alive and well under the city streets, running in giant culverts."

John Knott is Professor of English, University of Michigan. After working as a bookseller for twenty years, Keith Taylor now teaches writing part-time for the University of Michigan and works as a freelance writer.

Racial identity and literary form in the modernist anthology

The Image and the Fire examines the coterie anthology—a small, outsider literary collection—as a key, yet understudied, instrument of literary intervention within American modernism. Whit Frazier Peterson argues that these anthologies, produced outside of institutional or canonical frameworks, served as deliberate challenges to dominant literary paradigms. Distinct from academic anthologies that helped codify the American literary canon, coterie anthologies were used by both white and Black avant-garde movements to disrupt prevailing cultural narratives and assert alternative literary visions.

Through close analysis of three seminal case studies—Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound; Fire!!, a short-lived but groundbreaking magazine from the Harlem Renaissance, co-edited by Wallace Thurman; and Black Fire, compiled by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal during the Black Arts Movement—Peterson traces a genealogy of the coterie anthology as a politically charged genre. He reveals how Black American writers and editors, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, reappropriated and reconfigured this type of anthology format from white modernists.

Ultimately, The Image and the Fire positions the coterie anthology as a site of aesthetic and ideological contestation, one through which marginalized literary communities engaged in acts of cultural self-definition, canon revision, and formal innovation. By foregrounding the coterie anthology’s role in shaping a hybrid American modernism, Peterson contributes to ongoing conversations in literary studies around race, authorship, and the politics of literary form.

The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibilityaddresses a series of questions about common beliefs about adoption. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that human qualities are innate and intrinsic, an assumption often held by adoptees and their families, sometimes at great emotional cost. This book explores representations of adoption—transracial, transnational, and domestic same-race adoption—that reimagine human possibility by questioning this assumption and conceiving of alternatives.

Literary scholar Margaret Homans examines fiction making’s special relationship to themes of adoption, an “as if” form of family making, fabricated or fictional instead of biological or “real.” Adoption has tended to generate stories rather than uncover bedrock truths. Adoptive families are made, not born; in the words of novelist Jeanette Winterson, “adopted children are self-invented because we have to be.” In attempting to recover their lost histories and identities, adoptees create new stories about themselves. While some believe that adoptees cannot be whole unless they reconnect with their origins, others believe that privileging biology reaffirms hierarchies (such as those of race) that harm societies and individuals. Adoption is lived and represented through an irresolvable tension between belief in the innate nature of human traits and belief in their constructedness, contingency, and changeability. The book shows some of the ways in which literary creation, and a concept of adoption as a form of creativity, manages this tension.

The texts examined include fiction (e.g., classic novels such as Silas Marner, What Maisie Knew, and Beloved); memoirs by adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers; drama, documentary films, advice manuals, social science writing; and published interviews with adoptees, parents, and birth parents. Along the way the book tracks the quests of adoptees who, whether or not they meet their original families, must construct their own stories rather than finding them; follows transnational adoptees as they return, hopes held high, to Korea and China; looks over the shoulders of a generation of girls adopted from China as they watch Disney’s iconic Mulan, with its alluring story of destiny written on the skin; and listens to birthmothers as they struggle to tell painful secrets held for decades.

This book engages in debates within adoption studies, women’s and gender studies, transnational studies, and ethnic studies; it will appeal to literary scholars and critics, including specialists in memoir or narrative theory, and to general readers interested in adoption and in race.

The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism.

The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted “law of the heart,” emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other American writers relate the idea of the self to reality and culture in a more complex way: the self confronts and is reconciled to the paradox of history and reality.

In Girgus’ view, the tradition of pragmatic, humanistic individualism provides a foundation for a future where individual liberty is a major priority. He uses literary modernism as a bridge for relating contemporary social conditions to crises of the American self and culture as seen in the works of writers including Emerson, Howells, Whitman, Henry James, William James, Fitzgerald, Bellow, and McLuhan.

Electroshock. Hysterectomy. Lobotomy. These are only three of the many “cures” to which lesbians have been subjected in this century. How does a society develop such a profound aversion to a particular minority? In what ways do images in the popular media perpetuate cultural stereotypes about lesbians, and to what extent have lesbians been able to subvert and revise those images? This book addresses these and other questions by examining how lesbianism has been represented in American popular culture in the twentieth century and how conflicting ideologies have shaped lesbian experiences and identity.

In the first section, “Inventing the Lesbian,” Sherrie A. Inness explores depictions of lesbians in popular texts aimed primarily at heterosexual consumers. She moves from novels of the 1920s to books about life at women's colleges and boarding schools, to such contemporary women's magazines as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue.

In the next section, “Forms of Resistance,” Inness probes the ways in which lesbians have refashioned texts intended for a heterosexual audience or created their own narratives. One chapter shows how lesbian readers have reinterpreted the Nancy Drew mysteries, looking at them from a distinctly “queer” perspective. Another chapter addresses the changing portrayal of lesbians in children's books over the past two decades.

The last section, “Writing in the Margins,” scrutinizes the extent to which lesbians, themselves a marginalized group, have created a society that relegates some of its own members to the outskirts. Topics include the geographic politics of lesbianism, the complex issue of "passing," and the meaning of butch identity in twentieth-century lesbian culture.

The literary archive of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848) opens to view the conflicts and relationships across one of the most contested borders in the Americas. Most studies of this literature focus on the war's nineteenth-century moment of national expansion. In The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War, Jaime Javier Rodríguez brings the discussion forward to our own moment by charting a new path into the legacies of a military conflict embedded in the cultural cores of both nations.

Rodríguez's groundbreaking study moves beyond the terms of Manifest Destiny to ask a fundamental question: How do the war's literary expressions shape contemporary tensions and exchanges among Anglo Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. By probing the war's traumas, anxieties, and consequences with a fresh attention to narrative, Rodríguez shows us the relevance of the U.S.-Mexican War to our own era of demographic and cultural change. Reading across dime novels, frontline battle accounts, Mexican American writings and a wide range of other popular discourse about the war, Rodríguez reveals how historical awareness itself lies at the center of contemporary cultural fears of a Mexican "invasion," and how the displacements caused by the war set key terms for the ways Mexican Americans in subsequent generations would come to understand their own identities. Further, this is also the first major comparative study that analyzes key Mexican war texts and their impact on Mexico's national identity.

Eugene Gordon (1891–1974) was a major writer involved in the development of the burgeoning Black literary scene in Boston in the 1920s, an active player in the Harlem Renaissance, and a longtime member of the Communist Party. Despite his credentials as a reporter, editor, fiction writer, and political activist, he is rarely mentioned in studies of the Harlem Renaissance or Marxist politics. Here, Louis J. Parascandola has pulled together Gordon’s journalism, autobiographical writing, and fiction. This new collection, featuring both previously published pieces from a wide variety of publications as well as material that has never before been published, demonstrates his range and his skill while establishing his importance as a critical voice of his time.

Gordon was born and raised in the South but made his way north at a young age. In Boston, he founded the Saturday Evening Quill Club, an African American literary group that included other notable writers such as Helene Johnson and Dorothy West. He later became editor of and contributor to two major publications coming out of the era: the Messenger and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. As he grew more political, he joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and became editor of and contributor to the New Masses. Scholars looking to research him have struggled to find disparate writings to get a fuller sense of his literary stylings as well as his political commitments. This welcome new volume establishes Gordon as a significant, understudied figure.

The Necessary Earth is a study of the degree to which the long American experience with an open frontier has entered into an inherently American literature to distinguish it from that of other lands. Since literature is, in the author’s words, “a compound of time, place, and the individual projection of personal experience and reflection into objective forms,” the American compulsion to communicate their experience and their difference was a virtual guarantee that a native literature would arrive.

 The text falls into three major portions. The first considers the “age of wonder,” the impact of New World upon Old World comers to effect profound changes, and to set the new American on the parallel paths of idealism and pragmatism. The second part examines the effort of native-born writers to appropriate this experience for new metaphors and new literary theme. Without this effort, the frontier might have remained no more than a dwindling legend, and the transference to the theme of self-reliance might never have appeared. In the third portion the author turns to the twentieth century, examining here the degree to which the national theme of reliance on experience over tradition has persisted in the work of major authors.

 Ranging thus from Jamestown and Plymouth to Wallace Stevens, the book stresses, throughout, the pull of untamed nature on the human spirit, and the echoes of that experience in what is most intrinsic in American literature. Without denying frontier lawlessness or native chauvinism, Clough directs our attention primarily to the problems of the creation of a new language and a new metaphor to meet the new experience, and the persistence of a truly American note into a maturing of both manner and matter.

The lingering aftereffects of the Vietnam War resonate to this day throughout American society: in foreign policy, in attitudes about the military and war generally, and in the contemporary lives of members of the so-called baby boom generation who came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s. While the best-known personal accounts of the war tend to center on the experience of combat, Maureen Ryan's The Other Side of Grief examines the often overlooked narratives—novels, short stories, memoirs, and films—that document the war's impact on the home front. 

In analyzing the accounts of Vietnam veterans, women as well as men, Ryan focuses on the process of readjustment, on how the war continued to insinuate itself into their lives, their families, and their communities long after they returned home. She looks at the writings of women whose husbands, lovers, brothers, and sons served in Vietnam and whose own lives were transformed as a result. She also appraises the experiences of the POWs who came to be embraced as the war's only heroes; the ordeal of Vietnamese refugees who fled their “American War” to new lives in the United States; and the influential movement created by those who committed themselves to protesting the war. 

The end result of Ryan's investigations is a cogent synthesis of the vast narrative literature generated by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Together those stories powerfully demonstrate how deeply the legacies of the war penetrated American culture and continue to reverberate still.