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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
The Black Frontier, Aparajita Nanda
The Black Frontier, Aparajita Nanda
English
As a nationalistic concept, frontier refers to America's westward expansion, which was propelled in the nineteenth century by Manifest Destiny. Culturally, frontier promises even more: the creation of communities, the development of markets and states, the merging of peoples and cultures, and the promise of survival and persistence based on values of equality and democracy. Thousands of people left their homes in the East to pursue these ideals, including large communities of African Americans. However, African Americans, like many other cultural groups who moved westward, encountered struggles when they reached the new frontier. In some cases, they faced the same …
Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley
Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley
English
As laws change and we move several generations away from the times of greatest struggle, the atmosphere that created the contemporary scene for gay and lesbian citizens, their culture and politics, becomes increasingly remote and potentially forgotten. As recent historians have recalled, though, “This was a population too shy and fearful to even raise its hand, a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation’s culture,” –an “invisible people” (Clendinen, 11). The movement for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, considered by many to have originated with the …
Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham
Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham
English
What are the origins of the American novel? Does it begin with the imagination, when Europeans first began dreaming of life in the New World?1 Does it begin with Daniel Defoe’s adventurers, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and their literary progeny? Or does the novel need a material presence in the soil of the New World? Does it begin in 1789, with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy?—which Isaiah Thomas, with shrewd prescience, marketed as the “first American novel.” Or does it begin even earlier, in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin’s first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, …