A. Robert Lee

New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945

Black Fiction

Herman Melville: Modern readings: Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick

"Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction," twenty-three essays each carefully revised from the past four decades, explores both range and individual register. The collection opens with considerations of gothic as light and dark in Charles Brockden Brown, war and peace in Cooper s "The Spy," Antarctica as world-genesis in Poe s "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," the link of The Custom House and main text in Hawthorne s The Scarlet Letter, reflexive codings in Melville s "Moby-Dick" and "The Confidence-Man," Henry James "Hawthorne" as self-mirroring biography, and Stephen Crane s working of his Civil War episode in "The Red Badge of Courage." Two composite lineages address apocalypse in African American fiction and landscape in women s authorship from Sarah Orne Jewett to Leslie Marmon Silko. There follow culture and anarchy in Henry James "The Princess Casamassima," text-into-film in Edith Wharton s "The Age of Innocence," modernist stylings in Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, and roman noir in Cornell Woolrich. The collection then turns to the limitations of protest categorization for Richard Wright and Chester Himes, autofiction in J.D. Salinger s "The Catcher in the Rye," and the novel of ideas in Robert Penn Warren s late fiction. Three closing essays take up multicultural genealogy, Harlem, then the Black South, in African American fiction, and the reclamation of voice in Native American fiction. A. Robert Lee is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, having previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include "Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America" (1998), "Multicultural American Fiction: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions" (2003), which won the American Book Award for 2004, "Japan Textures: Sight and Word," with Mark Gresham (2007), and "United States: Re-viewing Multicultural American Literature" (2008).

Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction

Gothic to Multicultural

Contents: Introduction, A. Robert Lee; Reflections On, and In, "The Fall of the House of Usher," Mark Kinkead-Weekes; Doodling America: Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle," Harold Beaver; Poe's Stories of Premature Burial: "That Ere Kind of Style," Arnold Goldman; Poe's Comic Vision and Southwestern Humour, James Justus; Was the Chevalier Left-Handed? Poe's Dupin Stories, Robert Giddings; A Serious Case? Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, A. Robert Lee; "A Strange Sound, As of a Harp-string Broken": The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, David Murray; Law, Lawlessness and Philosophy in Edgar Allan Poe, Eric Mottram; "I am a Virginian": Edgar Allan Poe and the South, Richard Gray; Poe in France: A Myth Revisited, John Weightman

The Design of Order

Edgar Allan Poe

The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. This new study analyses three recent literary tranches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices – Hunter Thompson to Frank Chin, Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a latest purview of what, all too casually, has been designated "ethnic" writing. The aim is to set up and explore these different counter-seams of modern American writing, those which sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons.

Beats, Outriders, Ethnics

Modern American Counter Writing

IMAGINARIUM: SIGHTINGS, GALLERIES, SIGHTLINES, A. Robert Lee’s latest collection of poetry, turns on two connecting keynotes: imagination and sight. Across a broad canvas each of its sequences explores the ways we go about imagining as much as seeing reality. Sightings, which opens the book, turns upon a dozen or so celebrated paintings, among them J.M.W. Turner and Frida Kahlo. Galleriesextends the usual meaning of the term to include vantage-points like a French archeological cave, a Bosphorus Straits crossing and a Tokyo station. Sightlines frames a run of personal encounters within the heights and widths of buildings and landscapes – whether different Metro stations, or a major Japanese waterfall or Memphis’s Beale Street. IMAGINARIUM explores yet other kinds of seeing, including poems that use bird flight as metaphors of imagination, airplane travel and its larger meanings of self-journey, Science Fiction film and the envisioning of other worlds, a roster of US photography, and imagination itself as a process to be imagined. In sum the reader is invited into a two-way exchange, imagination as seeing, seeing as imagination.

Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines

Herman Melville

Stung by the critical reception and lack of commercial success of his previous two works, Moby-Dick and Pierre, Herman Melville became obsessed with the difficulties of communicating his vision to readers. His sense of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. "Billy Budd, Sailor," a classic confrontation between good and evil, is the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against a wrongful accusation. The other selections here-"Bartleby," "The Encantadas," "Benito Cereno," and "The Piazza"-also illuminate, in varying guises, the way fictions are created and shared with a wider society. In his introduction Frederick Busch discusses Melville's preoccupation with his "correspondence with the world," his quarrel with silence, and why fiction was, for Melville, "a matter of life and death." Book jacket.

Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories

Arthur Robert Lee

Studies in American Autobiography

First Person Singular

Brian Docherty

Focuses on some of the most popular writers of the last forty years. One of the few books to explore the role of women and gender in the Beat movement.

Beat Generation Writers

'Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette' seeks to give expression in poem and metaphor to the United States as a personally lived and engaged-with culture. The span, accordingly, involves both site and journey, a roster of art, people, different authorships, film, music, photography, cities, society. Prose sketches both serious and antic as well as verse. American Studies with a difference.

Selected Verse and Vignette

Americas

Gerald Vizenor

Postindian Conversations is the first collection of in-depth interviews with Gerald Vizenor, one of the most powerful and provocative voices in the Native world today. These lively conversations with the preeminent novelist and cultural critic reveal much about the man, his literary creations, and his critical perspectives on important issues affecting Native peoples at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book also casts new light on his sometimes controversial ideas about contemporary Native identity, politics, economics, scholarship, and literature. Gerald Vizenor is a professor of American Studies and Native American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the American Book Award-winner Griever: An American Monkey King in China. A. Robert Lee is a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo. His books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America. His edited works include Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader.

Postindian Conversations

Using a cultural studies perspective, examines both fiction and autobiographical writings from minority authors including Toni Morrison, Gerald Vizenor, and Sandra Cisneros.

Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions

Multicultural American Literature

Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction, twenty-three essays each carefully revised from the past four decades, explores both range and individual register. The collection opens with considerations of gothic as light and dark in Charles Brockden Brown, war and peace in Cooper’s The Spy, Antarctica as world-genesis in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the link of “The Custom House” and main text in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, reflexive codings in Melville’s Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man, Henry James’ Hawthorne as self-mirroring biography, and Stephen Crane’s working of his Civil War episode in The Red Badge of Courage. Two composite lineages address apocalypse in African American fiction and landscape in women’s authorship from Sarah Orne Jewett to Leslie Marmon Silko. There follow culture and anarchy in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima, text-into-film in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, modernist stylings in Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, and roman noir in Cornell Woolrich. The collection then turns to the limitations of protest categorization for Richard Wright and Chester Himes, autofiction in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the novel of ideas in Robert Penn Warren’s late fiction. Three closing essays take up multicultural genealogy, Harlem, then the Black South, in African American fiction, and the reclamation of voice in Native American fiction.

Aquest estudi analitza un ordre literari canviant: Amèrica com unitat i diversitat, com un ens nacional i transnacional. Els escrits crítics literaris reunits aquí ofereixen una sèrie de perspectives que tracen gran part de la geografia cultural en joc: la narrativa, l'autobiografia, el teatre, etc. Es presenten també un conjunt d'assajos i ressenyes que, amb diverses direccions d'enfocament, posen atenció als fonaments previs a Colón, a una antologia canònica nord-americana de poesia i al que s'ha omès; la narrativa llatina i als principals dramaturgs antics. Inclou entrevistes a creatius i acadèmics com Gerald Vizenor, Frank Chin, Louis Owens, John Cawelti i Rex Burns. La secció de ressenyes final ofereix una sèrie de monografies de rellevant erudició multicultural així com contribucions a l'emergent i ampli mural d'anàlisi.

Re-Viewing American Multicultural Literature

United States

Native America can look to few more inventive contemporary writers than Gerald Vizenor. This work discusses his childhood in the Minneapolis of the Depression and World War II to his becoming a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Berkeley.

Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor

Loosening the Seams

The world is anything but unfamiliar with diaspora: Jewish, African, Armenian, Roma-Gipsy, Filipino/a, Tamil, Irish or Italian, even Japanese. But few have carried so global a resonance as that of China. What, then, of literary-cultural expression, the huge body of fiction which has addressed itself to that plurality of lives and geographies and which has come to be known as “After China”? This collection of essays offers bearings on those written in English, and in which both memory and story are central, spanning the USA to Australia, Canada to the UK, Hong Kong to Singapore, with yet others of more transnational nature.This collection opens with a reprise of woman-authored Chinese American fiction using Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan as departure points. In turn follow readings of the oeuvres of Tan and Frank Chin. A comparative essay takes up novels by Canadian, American and Australian authors from the perspective of migrancy as fracture. Chinese Canada comes into view in accounts of SKY Lee, Wayson Choy, Evelyn Lau and Larissa Lai. Australia under Chinese literary auspices is given a comparative mapping through the fiction of Brian Castro and Ouyang Yu. The English language “China fiction” of Singapore and Hong Kong is located in essays centred, respectively, on Martin Booth and Po Wah Lam, and Hwee Hwee Tan and Colin Cheong. The collection rounds out with portraits of Timothy Mo as British transnational author, a selection of contextual Chinese British stories and art, and the phenomenon of “Chinese Chick Lit” novels. China Fictions/English Language will be of interest to readers drawn both to “After China” as diasporic literary heritage and comparative literature in general.

Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story

China Fictions, English Language

Beat literature? Have not the great canonical names long grown familiar? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Likewise the frontline texts, still controversial in some quarters, assume their place in modern American literary history. On the Road serves as Homeric journey epic. "Howl" amounts to Beat anthem, confessional outcry against materialism and war. Naked Lunch, with its dark satiric laughter, envisions a dystopian world of power and word virus. But if these are all essentially America-centered, Beat has also had quite other literary exhalations and which invite far more than mere reception study. These are voices from across the Americas of Canada and Mexico, the Anglophone world of England, Scotland or Australia, the Europe of France or Italy and from the Mediterranean of Greece and the Maghreb, and from Scandinavia and Russia, together with the Asia of Japan and China. This anthology of essays maps relevant other kinds of Beat voice, names, texts. The scope is hemispheric, Atlantic and Pacific, West and East. It gives recognition to the Beat inscribed in languages other than English and reflective of different cultural histories. Likewise the majority of contributors come from origins or affiliations beyond the US, whether in a different English or languages spanning Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. The aim is to recognize an enlarged Beat literary map, its creative internationalism.

The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, and Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays by established, international scholars; a recent interview with the author; a semiautobiographical keynote address delivered at an international conference that ruminates on her Japanese American heritage; and a full bibliography. The essays offer fresh and in-depth readings of the magic realist canvas of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); the Japanese emigrant portraiture of Brazil-Maru (1992); Los Angeles as rambunctious geopolitical and transnational fulcrum of the Americas in Tropic of Orange (1997); the fraught relationship of Japanese and Brazilian heritage and labor in Circle K Cycles (2001); Asian American history and politics of the 1960s in I Hotel (2010); and Anime Wong (2014), a gallery of performativity illustrating the contested and inextricable nature of East and West. This essay-collection explores Yamashita’s use of the fantastical, the play of emerging transnational ethnicity, and the narrative tactics of reflexivity and bricolage in storytelling located on a continuum of the unique and the communal, of the past and the present, and that are mapped in various spatial and virtual realities.

Fictions of Magic and Memory

Karen Tei Yamashita

Alan R. Velie

The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence. The contributors scrutinize writers from Momaday to Sherman Alexie, analyzing works by Native women, First Nations Canadian writers, postmodernists, and such theorists as Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. Weaver’s own examination of the development of Native literary criticism since 1968 focuses on Native American literary nationalism. Alan R. Velie turns to the achievement of Momaday to examine the ways Native novelists have influenced one another. Post-renaissance and postmodern writers are discussed in company with newer writers such as Gordon Henry, Jr., and D. L. Birchfield. Critical essays discuss the poetry of Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Diane Glancy, Luci Tapahonso, and Ray A. Young Bear, as well as the life writings of Janet Campbell Hale, Carter Revard, and Jim Barnes. An essay on Native drama examines the work of Hanay Geiogamah, the Native American Theater Ensemble, and Spider Woman Theatre. In the volume’s concluding essay, Kenneth Lincoln reflects on the history of the Native American Renaissance up to and beyond his seminal work, and discusses Native literature’s legacy and future. The essays collected here underscore the vitality of Native American literature and the need for debate on theory and ideology.

A. Robert Lee

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