Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 0008-199X - ISSN (Online) 1471-6836 Published by Oxford University Press[406 journals]
Abstract: Kasia Boddy is a Reader in American Literature at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Boxing: A Cultural History (2008), The American Short Story Since 1950 (2010), and Geranium (2013), as well as various essays on modern and contemporary fiction and culture. PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfz004 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Authors:Boddy K. Pages: 1 - 17 Abstract: In the approach to the 2016 presidential election and in its aftermath, the American press ran a lot of stories asking (as the Washington Post put it), ‘Is America More Divided by Race or Class'’11 The question was not unfamiliar – writers on the left had long debated whether class and race should be understood as distinct categories or whether ‘the production of racial and other difference is itself part of the logic of capital’ – but in 2016 it was framed largely in terms of a struggle between a politics of identity and one of economic equality.22 For some, the latter had dropped dangerously out of sight. Mark Lilla, for example, calling for a revival in American liberalism, complained that his Columbia University students were uninterested in learning about ‘class structure’ or any form of economics ‘that’s not economics in order to get you into business school’.33 Walter Benn Michaels, considerably to the left of Lilla, noted that Wall Street was happy to embrace ‘diversity’ and address ‘non-economic’ forms of inequality, as long as it could continue to ignore ‘economic inequality’.44 Michaels is a literary critic, not a sociologist, and much of his ire is directed against American novelists who (as he sees it) have followed Wall Street’s example by paying attention to the politics of diversity while consistently ignoring ‘the fact that some people have more money than others’.55 In 2009, for example, he eviscerated those critics who judged Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) to be ‘the best work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years’.66 The issue at stake was not the quality of the novel but its subject matter. For Michaels, Morrison’s focus on the historical roots of ‘a nation divided by race and racism’ was problematic because ‘we’re effectively being told that our problem is lingering racism – not burgeoning capitalism. And when Morrison wins the Nobel Prize and Obama becomes president, we’re being reassured that we are headed in the right direction, even if we’re not there yet’.77 PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy040 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Authors:Maxey R. Pages: 33 - 49 Abstract: Literary anthologies have long posed problems. They privilege certain genres and shorter texts, often representing longer works through excerpts. They threaten to reduce the complexity of literature by decontextualising it, inviting a potential over-reliance on brief explanatory notes, and presenting a selection of works as though it follows ‘a telos of development’ while ‘erasing the materiality of specific texts’.11 They exemplify a project of coalition-forging and nation-building. As Joe Lockard and Jillian Sandell have argued in relation to American literature anthologies, each such volume is ‘a political and educational tool’.22 Since bestselling US literary anthologies are often intended for an undergraduate audience, editors may favour pedagogical aims over scholarly and aesthetic ones in the sense that they package their selections as a usable canon with specific courses in mind, sometimes ignoring thornier questions of what is being considered ‘representative’ and what has been excluded.33 It is difficult to separate such collections from trends within the publishing marketplace or ‘today’s corporatized academy and its affiliated publishing culture’.44 Critics have drawn attention to the containment and commodification of ethnic difference within both mainstream and minority anthologies.55 Lockard and Sandell note that ‘what an anthology omits is often as significant as what it includes … The anthology, like the national canon more generally, attempts to represent a national literature but that representation is structured as much by its racialized and gendered absences as it is by its actual contents.’66 As Karen L. Kilcup puts it, ‘by definition, what’s in is important and good, and what’s omitted is at least potentially questionable’.77 PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy037 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Authors:Keating K. Pages: 50 - 64 Abstract: Repetition is central to the structure and spirit of the francophone villanelle, a nineteen-line form composed of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The opening and closing lines of the first tercet alternate as the closing lines for subsequent tercets, before coming together as the final two lines of the concluding quatrain. Full end-rhymes are also expected throughout, both in the first and third lines of the tercets, and to connect the middle lines of these stanzas, resulting in a unique and instantly identifiable form: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2. This construction, ‘the classic form of repetition and persistence’,11 foregrounds an inability to progress without a turn to the past, as the villanelle ‘circles around and around, refusing to go forward in any kind of linear development … suggesting at the deepest level, powerful recurrences of mood and emotion and memory’.22 The villanelle, informed by what has been described as ‘the law of return’,33 has become one of the more popular conventional forms in contemporary Irish poetry, having attracted a number of established and emerging Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Sinéad Morrissey. To trace its emergence and entry into anglophone Irish poetry reveals the efforts of contemporary poets to exploit the form’s structure and history to complicate the Irish literary tradition and to foreground their literary inheritance as transnational, transgressing the borders of nation, language, and culture. PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy036 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Authors:Burlinson C. Pages: 65 - 69 Abstract: The Country House Library by PurcellMark. National Trust/Yale University Press, 2017. £45. ISBN 9 7803 0022 7406 PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy028 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Authors:Chalmers H. Pages: 69 - 75 Abstract: A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing edited by PhillippyPatricia. Cambridge University Press, 2018. £105. ISBN 9 7811 0713 7066 PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy029 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Authors:Wilkinson C. Pages: 78 - 83 Abstract: How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of Financial Crisis by WeinerAdam. Bloomsbury, 2016. £15.99. ISBN 9 7815 0131 3110 PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy039 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Authors:Jagger J. Pages: 90 - 94 Abstract: Diary of a Bipolar Explorer by NewlynLucy. Signal Books, 2018. £9.99. ISBN 9 7819 0993 0636 PubDate: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy030 Issue No:Vol. 48, No. 1 (2019)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[406 journals]
