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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Nostalgia And Modernist Anxiety, Elizabeth Outka Jan 2013

Nostalgia And Modernist Anxiety, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Here at the end of the collection I want to propose going back to the beginning—not to the beginning of nostalgic desire in the modernist era, but to the start of the anxiety over nostalgia in the modernist era. The discomfort has, I want to argue, two distinct periods: the early twentieth-century anxiety that various modernists had toward nostalgia, and the later uneasiness modernist critics have with nostalgia within the modernist period. Most eras, of course, experience at least some form of nostalgic longing, along with a corresponding distrust and uneasiness about such longing. The apprehension that nostalgia may provoke …


Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance Nov 2010

Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In 2008 at the age of eighty-nine, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing returned to the mother who has haunted her life and her literature in order to rewrite a fictional account of the life that might have been and a biographical account of the life that she actually lived in Alfred & Emily. Her efforts to finally exorcise the powerful and hated figure that has hounded her for most of her eighty-nine years call to mind similar efforts throughout the canon of fifty-nine-year-old celebrated Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid to free herself. Both writers take advantage of and seek to find …


Tragic No More?: The Reappearance Of The Racially Mixed Character, Suzanne W. Jones Jan 2008

Tragic No More?: The Reappearance Of The Racially Mixed Character, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

During the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, the tragic mulatto/a figured prominently in American fiction, only to recede after the Harlem Renaissance when African-American writers called for "race pride" and racial solidarity and to disappear entirely in the late 1960s after the Black Power movement ushered in racially conscious concepts such as "Black Is Beautiful." Since 1990, however, the mixed black-white character has made a significant comeback in American fiction. Contemporary representations suggest that choosing one's racial identity is only slightly less difficult than it used to be because of American society's conflation of skin color and identity. …


The Late Modernism Of Cormac Mccarthy (Review), Peter Lurie, Mark A. Eaton Jan 2004

The Late Modernism Of Cormac Mccarthy (Review), Peter Lurie, Mark A. Eaton

English Faculty Publications

David Holloway's titular phrasing "late modernism" has an effective ring. It captures the theoretical underpinnings of his recent book, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, evoking Fredric Jameson's work, on which Holloway heavily relies, while also situating McCarthy precisely where he wants him to be, historically and culturally. According to Holloway, McCarthy's fiction constitutes an important redoubt against the diminishing of modernism's once-valorous stance by forging a productive opposition to what he sees as a final stage in capitalist expansion. At the heart of Holloway's project is his concern to restore an oppositional vitality to literary production, or what …


Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance Jul 2002

Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Another Life Derek Walcott wrote, "I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy"; Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris signified on this image in his The Pond when he declared, "And these are my rooms now." The journey that Walcott makes from "houseboy" to master/ruler/owner of the house of literature (the Nobel Laureate is frequently acclaimed the greatest poet writing in the English language) is painstakingly detailed in Bruce King's tome Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.


The Shell Seekers And Working Women Readers’ Search For Serenity, Suzanne W. Jones Jan 1999

The Shell Seekers And Working Women Readers’ Search For Serenity, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For the last decade feminist literary critics have convincingly argued that bestselling novels from Gone with the Wind (1936) and Forever Amber (1944) to The Valley of the Dolls (1966) and The Flame and the Flower (1972) reveal the psychic needs of twentieth-century middle-class American women, and that these needs have as much to do with desire for the emotional sustenance they once received from their mothers as with desire for heterosexual romance. However, as more and more women have moved from the private to the public workplace, their psychic needs have changed somewhat. Based on the American popularity of …


"Journey To An Expectation:" A Reflection And A Prayer, Daryl Cumber Dance Apr 1997

"Journey To An Expectation:" A Reflection And A Prayer, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

From Francis Williams in the first quarter of the 18th century to Phillis Wheatley in 1773 to C. L. R. James in 1932, to Sam Selvon and George Lamming in 1950, they pack their manuscripts and head to the Mother Country seeking the approval of the Colonialist Publisher, carrying a dream that cannot come true for the Black Colonial on this side of the ocean, certainly not in a little island where all too often people think the only artists are calypsonians or reggae stars. I can envision those budding writers setting out on what Lamming called their "journey to …