College Literature articles from September 2002

College Literature archives from September 2002

Introduction.(Editorial)
September 22, 2002... Trying to define and to talk about what work is proves a tricky and slippery endeavor. Are all types of employment "work"? Is working for payment different than working as a volunteer? Is building a house different than grading papers or...

"The facts which go to form this fiction": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner and the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics Reports.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... Although not widely taught, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's powerful novel of industrial privation and upper-class privilege, The Silent Partner (1871), is beginning to have considerable importance for students of American literature and society....

"Work with a Purpose": Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl and the American Work Ethic.(Louisa May Alcott)(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... At the conclusion of her second novel for children, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Louisa May Alcott creates the anticipated happy endings for her characters, complete with two marriages. This conclusion, though, provides a uniquely American definition...

Crisis? Whose crisis? George Orwell and liberal guilt.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... In this paper I examine George Orwell's approach to one of the more embarrassing moments in twentieth-century liberalism: the failure of middle-class liberals to connect with the working class. Orwell was unfashionably quick to admit his...

Proletarian paperbacks: the Little Blue Books and Working-Class Culture.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... In December of 1934, Louis Adamic published an article in the Saturday Review of Literature entitled: What the Proletariat Reads: Conclusions Based on a Year's Study Among Hundreds of Workers Throughout the United States." Responding to the...

Rags to Riches to Suicide: Unhappy Narratives of Upward Mobility: Martin Eden, Bread Givers, Delia's song, and Hunger of Memory.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... The middle class... is a source of tremendous ambivalence from a working-class perspective. Middle-class status is highly desirable for its greater material affluence and security, but undesirable for all the ways in...

Writer on the Left: Class and Race in Ellison's Early Fiction.(Ralph Ellison)(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... Eight years after his death, Ralph Ellison's work is undergoing a reassessment. Invisible Man, the only volume of fiction Ellison published during his lifetime, has long been recognized as a major novel; indeed, it has been named as the most...

"New world" or "American" empire?(Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction)(America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire)(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Fisher, Philip. 1999. Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $32.00 hc. $17.95 sc. 290 pp. Spanos, William. 2000. America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire....

The politics of representation in Asian American literature.(Chinese American Literature Since the 1850s. The Asian American Experience)(The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity)(Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America)(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Yin, Xiao-huang. 2000. Chinese American Literature Since the 1850s. The Asian American Experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $34.95 hc. 307 pp. Ma, Sheng-Mei. 2000. The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity....

Yaeger, Patricia. 2000. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Yaeger, Patricia. 2000. Dirt end Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $49.00 hc. $18.00 sc. xviii + 324 pp. Patricia Yaeger opens her provocative study with a rejection of Ellen...

Prashad, Vijay. 2000. The Karma of Brown Folk.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Prashad, Vijay. 2000. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $24.95 hc. $16.95 sc. xv + 253pp. Perhaps I am not alone in fearing an outbreak of racism due to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. While...

Johnson, Patricia E. 2001. Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Johnson, Patricia E. 2001. Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press. $55.00 hc. S24.95 sc. 224 pp. It has always seemed to me imminently obvious that a literary scholar whose...

Wood, Mark David. 2000. Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Wood, Mark David. 2000. Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $29.95 hc. ix + 239 pp. These are tough times for Marxists and Marxist theorists. Not only does the expansion of global...

Lardas, John. 2001. The Bop Apocalypse: the Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Lardas, John. 2001. The Bop Apocalypse." The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $30.95 hc. 316 pp. John Lardas's analysis of the Beat Generation--Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and...

Books received: April 15, 2002 to July 15, 2002.
September 22, 2002... Bacon, Jacqueline. 2002. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. $39.95 hc. xiv + 291 pp. Bahar, Saba. 2002. Mary Wollstonecraft's Social and Aesthetic Philosophy....