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Abstract: In 1927, when Upton Sinclair published Oil!—an impassioned denunciation of the eponymous industry—the anti-capitalist spirit of the novel was familiar, but its subject was unique. Rather than confining his critiques of industrial capitalism to the factory floor, Sinclair turned his attention to the material framework of modernity itself, that is, the burgeoning fossil fuel industries in the United States. In Oil!, Sinclair explicitly registers the social and ecological exploitation suffusing the fossil fuel production process at every stage, from extraction to refinement to consumption and beyond. Throughout the novel, fossil capitalists' accumulation of wealth is wholly contingent on the total, relentless ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In a postscript to an unpublished 1897 letter to Roberts Brothers publishers, Theodore Dreiser asks about the firm's trade rate for Grant Allen's 1895 New Woman novel, The Woman Who Did. Although Dreiser's reference to Allen's novel is brief, even offhanded, and there is no definitive evidence that he read it, the postscript indicates that Dreiser was aware of the text and suggests possible connections between Allen's novel and Dreiser's work.1 The letter is written on Ev'ry Month letterhead on 15 May 1897, the last year of Dreiser's editorship at the women's magazine. Allen's role as a possible early influence for Dreiser reflects the ways in which Dreiser's time at Ev'ry Month provided, as Nancy Warner Barrineau ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Oxen by definition are beasts of burden, animals distinguished from normal bovines by their economic utility. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, oxen are mammals from the family Bovidae "domesticated for [their] milk, meat, and hide," with the designation frequently used specifically to refer to those bovines "used as … draught animal[s]" ("ox, n."). As such, oxen, put under their yoke, are ready stand-ins for any creature exemplary of the loss of agency, subsumed under another's will.Oxen are put to great literary work in Stephen Crane's little-heralded novel The Third Violet (1897).1 Often disregarded as one of his artistic failures, the novel is sometimes seen as Crane's awkward attempt at writing a ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Due to its subject matter, and the drastic nature of new forms of naturalism more generally, this essay contains descriptions of sexual and racist violence, explicit images, and offensive language.In "Das unerträgliche Bild [The Unbearable Image]" (2019), Volker Hille points to filmic ekphrasis as a means to reduce the emotional distance between visual representations of violence and movie audiences.1 In Martin McDonagh's black comedy crime film In Bruges (2008), for example, looking at Gerard David's late medieval diptych The Judgment of Cambyses (1498) through the eyes of Ray (Colin Farrell) results in affective participation in the protagonist's confrontation with an image of sadistic cruelty (see Hille 88–93 ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Part II of this essay will continue to trace "Escalations of Sexuality and Violence in Transnational Neonaturalism" (I.) in neo-noir crime dramas, the neo-Western, and dystopian science fiction.In the chapter "Pornographic Imagination, Naturalist Gothic, Interpictoriality, and Transnational Adaptation in Neo-Noir Crime and Western Drama" (I. 2.), after pointing to historical and generic parallels between Gothicism and naturalism, the author will first compare neonaturalist elements in True Detective (2014–present), La isla mínima (2014), and Freies Land (2019), to then look at other seminal examples of the genre, such as Nocturnal Animals (2016), Cracker (1993–2006), and The Sinner (2017–21). A postcolonial focus ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: During his twelve years of service as President of the Cormac McCarthy Society, Steven Frye has been instrumental in promoting and advancing the field of McCarthy studies through significant independent and collaborative initiatives. Frye's Understanding Cormac McCarthy (2011) remains perhaps the most accessible single-authored introduction to McCarthy's life, thought, and work, and his landmark editions The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy (2013) and Cormac McCarthy in Context (2020) provide an array of rich and foundational essays on multiple aspects of McCarthy's oeuvre, both generic and thematic, by leading scholars in the field. Unguessed Kinships is a more focused study on a particular and nonetheless ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson's edited collection The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism makes a significant contribution to the fields of American literary naturalism, ecocritical, material culture, animal, and posthumanist studies. The editors emphasize the contribution of the book in their introduction, in which they argue that while research on American literary naturalism has focused on "genre conventions, the thematic engagement with evolution and determinism, and the plot of decline," this has eclipsed the equally strong concern in naturalist texts with "the nonhuman animals, landscapes, cityscapes, and other entities that constitute the environmental forces affecting the humans" (3).The ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the late-nineteenth-century American cultural scene, there was a curious debate about the nature of—and purpose for—pain. Was pain something to be alleviated, conquered by advances in medical science most fully embodied by the newest developments with anesthesia' Or was pain something to be endured, and through that (often masculinized) endurance something to be celebrated as an expression of vitality and of life itself' It is in reflection on these two questions, and both their historical and philosophical implications, that Cynthia J. Davis begins her exquisitely researched Pain and the Aesthetics of U.S. Literary Realism, arguing that the problem of pain and suffering fundamentally animates American literary ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: It is always refreshing to encounter original readings of American women writers, and New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins certainly does not disappoint! The book invites readers into the world of Freeman's fiction, which is known among scholars of regionalism but less familiar to general audiences. As a scholar of American literary naturalism, I have encountered her work, but knew very little prior to reading this book, which has energized me to read more. Edited by Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou, and Cécile Roudeau, New Perspectives divides neatly into four parts that show a scholarly progression of reading Freeman with and against the grain.The book includes a wide array of images that clearly complement the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Patrick Kindig's Fascination is an engrossing meditation on the role of absorptive attention in American culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Engaging with a wide array of texts encompassing literary genres, medical and philosophical writing, motion pictures, and the popular discourse of the period, Kindig argues that authors and commentators at the time regarded modernity not simply in terms of distraction and disenchantment but as "characterized by its capacity to fascinate"—that is, the distinct ability "to capture and hold attention in quasi-supernatural ways" (10). As a state of fixed attention and perceptual stimulation, fascination is foregrounded in Kindig's work as a historical ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-09T00:00:00-05:00
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