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Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature
Editor: Robin DeRosa
Date Of Publication: Sep 2008
Isbn13: 9781847187826
Isbn: 1-84718-782-X
Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature is a collection of essays that explores the complex interplay between dominance and oppression. Spanning the “long” early American period, the collection considers texts written from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Native Americans, Puritan ministers and Puritan “whores,” Barbadian and transatlantic slaves: the early American figures who populate these essays are talking about power, and creating—in writing—a dynamic and complicated relationship between the mainstream and the margin. The essays in this collection offer a collective paradigm for thinking about these issues, one in which “assimilation” and “subversion” are not so much oppositional as they are closely aligned, codependent, and mutually defining. Though these essays do maintain the dialectical play between the two terms, they offer new ways to think about dialectic itself. The goal of the collection is to give readers useful models for approaching texts by nondominant subjects, models that consider the polyphonic flow of power and the possibility of simultaneous multiple, conflicting, and even oppositional effects of oppression. The collection begins by looking at complex representations of the Christianized Native American, moves through a discussion of “creolized” West Indian and “converted” African slave narratives, explores the ironic uses of sentimentality in a nineteenth-century novel about slavery, and ends with a study of female criminality and the way that it both subverted and reinscribed dominant Puritan orthodoxy. The liminal spaces where assimilation becomes subversion (and vice versa) go by many difference names in this collection: the contact zone, the transcultured, the hybrid, the syncretic, the zombie, the pardodic, the parabolic, the transgressive, the framed. Each of the contributors works to find ways to describe this space without simultaneously closing it down. It can be a significant rhetorical challenge to articulate what might ultimately be a paradox, but this collection aims not only to look at familiar texts in new ways, but also to think about the critical process in a new way. In what ways does the critic’s own explication of a text undermine and stabilize the text’s coherent meaning? This is, in many ways, a collection that investigates this methodological question even as it focuses on the nature of power and how “the oppressed” write their way into and out of their own oppression. Contributors include John J. Kucich, Ann M. Brunjes, Nicole N. Aljoe, Robin DeRosa, Mary Getchell, and Kristina Lucenko.
Robin DeRosa is an Assistant Professor of English at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, where she teaches early American literature and critical theory and chairs the Women’s Studies program. Dr. DeRosa has recently published articles in Women As Sites of Culture (Ashgate) and Native American Rhetorics (forthcoming from U Pittsburgh P), and is currently working on a manuscript entitled Specters, Scholars, and Sightseers: The Salem Witch Trials and American Memory.
Price Uk Gbp: 14.99
Price Us Usd: 22.99
Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)
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From Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road
“Katherine Burkman, best known for her contributions to Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and modern drama studies in general, now provides an essential reference for students of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the beats through this memoir by Elbert Lenrow. A beloved teacher at the New School for Social Research, Lenrow met and taught Jack Kerouac in the late forties, befriending him and Allen Ginsberg as well. The book offers unprecedented insight into the beats in general and Kerouac’s development as a writer, thinker, and cultural force in American literature. Howard Cunnell, who introduces the book, notes that through his friendship with Kerouac, ‘Lenrow got to ride in what would become the most famous car in modern American literature.’ And thanks to this book, now readers of Kerouac Ascending do, too.”
—Ann C. Hall, Professor, Ohio Dominican University; President, Harold Pinter Society
“The larger significance of the sustained and sustaining friendship between Elbert Lenrow and Kerouac and Ginsberg in this book is that it exhibits Jack and Allen in ways that are seldom, if ever, represented in accounts of their lives. As a bonus, from this fine, small book, the reader can acquire an enriched and enhanced understanding of the multifarious political, literary, and artistic relationships of virtually all the principal players in the cultural scene in the mid- to late 20th century.”
—James L. Battersby, Professor Emeritus of English, Ohio State University
“Always their affectionate elder, Lenrow presents Kerouac and Ginsberg mostly in their own words, making no broad claim or judgments beyond the recognition that both writers spoke for their time as Walt Whitman did for his and that they have become iconic figures for a literary movement. It is a modest but important work presenting original materials saved by a gentle, sensitive, and literate man.”
—Mark S. Auburn, Professor Emeritus of English, former Senior Vice President and Provost at the University of Akron
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