Project MUSE®: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 44, no. 3 (1988) through current issueLatest Articles: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and TheoryTWOProject MUSE®Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory1558-95950004-1610Latest articles in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: The American Novel at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985531
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American literary history, like any national literary history, has seen its share of vicissitudes. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for example, was far and away the most esteemed poet of the nineteenth century yet is scarcely studied today, while Walt Whitman, though banned in the nineteenth century, has remained one of the most written-about and taught poets of the twentieth and twenty-first. The fortunes of individual writers and artists shift with the winds of new generations and their differing priorities, aesthetic and political, and there is nothing too remarkable about that. What is remarkable, however, is to witness an entire sector of literary history move in and out of focus in the way that American
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmallIntroduction: The American Novel at the Turn of the Twentieth Century2026-03-13text/htmlen-USIntroduction: The American Novel at the Turn of the Twentieth Century2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®563922026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13“The Boarding House of Genre: Space, Tenancy and Narrative Form in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985532
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Just before the narrative climax of contending forces (1900), Pauline Hopkins’s narrator indicates a conviction that the built environment plays a significant role in structuring everyday life and experience. When John P. Langley, a central villain in the novel, visits a fortune teller, he receives information that both precipitates the trajectory of the novel’s heroine, Sappho Clark, and foreshadows his own death. During this scene, the narrator opines that “after all, our surroundings influence our lives and characters as much as fate, destiny, or any supernatural agency” (Hopkins 282). For both John and Sappho, these surroundings are the South End Boston boarding house in which they both rent rooms from the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmall“The Boarding House of Genre: Space, Tenancy and Narrative Form in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces”2026-03-13text/htmlen-US“The Boarding House of Genre: Space, Tenancy and Narrative Form in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces”2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®652092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13McTeague and the Afterlives of Empire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985533
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Near the end of frank norris’s 1899 novel, mcteague, the title character returns to the California mining country of his youth, and, as the novel concludes, McTeague and his friend-turned-nemesis, Marcus Schouler, are locked in a life and death struggle in Death Valley. These Western contexts suggest McTeague’s nostalgia, albeit ironic, for the American frontier, which the superintendent of the Census declared closed in 1890, and Frederick Jackson Turner three years later argued was a decisive factor in the shaping of US democracy and culture. In an essay titled “The Frontier Gone at Last” (1902), Norris would declare that the frontier was still pushing outward across the globe through the imperial project of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmallMcTeague and the Afterlives of Empire2026-03-13text/htmlen-USMcTeague and the Afterlives of Empire2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®838902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Origins of Black Naturalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985534
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In the 1897 the sun article “the negroes of the ten-derloin,”1 Paul Laurence Dunbar, already the first black writer born after slavery to attain international stature from his writings alone,2 paints a disquieting picture of African American life in the urban North. Dunbar writes from the perspective of a relatively advantaged group of black migrants about the “Negro problem” that has insidiously taken hold in Northern cities: “Our eyes, turned away from home, did not perceive that much the same problem was creeping to our very doors” (Sport 264). According to Dunbar, overexposure to city life and a habit of thinking of the “Negro problem” as Southern have prevented his peers from recognizing how dire conditions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmallPaul Laurence Dunbar and the Origins of Black Naturalism2026-03-13text/htmlen-USPaul Laurence Dunbar and the Origins of Black Naturalism2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®888112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Mighty Liars in the Utopia: Science, Violence, and Belief in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985535
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In early 1885, during the lecture tour promoting Huckleberry Finn—the same tour where Twain picked up a copy of Morte D’Arthur and conceived of Connecticut Yankee—he visited his mother for the last time. Jane Clemens was in her eighties, and “her memory [was] fading” (Kaplan 407). During their conversations, Twain felt the “noble and heroic impulse” to confess one of his childhood sins (“Autobiography” 12): Thirty-five years earlier, Twain had lied about being mesmerized. As a child, Sam Clemens volunteered for a demonstration where a mesmerist supposedly put him into a coma-like state that rendered him insensitive to pain and capable of strange acts of divination. As an adult, Twain admits that “he had faked his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmallMighty Liars in the Utopia: Science, Violence, and Belief in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee2026-03-13text/htmlen-USMighty Liars in the Utopia: Science, Violence, and Belief in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®927992026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13“Again the Sound. What Could It Be?”: Untethered Voices in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985536
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The human voice—whether individual or collective, authoritative or seditious, materially sonic or evocatively metaphoric—has long been a key player in the production and consolidation of the United States. In early America, clergy and other community leaders used oratory to formulate ideas and communicate them to an emerging national audience.1 Meanwhile, those who lacked proper standing to challenge such early leaders often forced a place for themselves through unruly public vocal acts, a practice that Nancy Ruttenberg calls the voice of democratic personality: “unanticipated, inarticulate, uncontainable, heedless of the forms, ventriloquizing a higher will and truth” (6). Voice went on to operate as a potent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmall“Again the Sound. What Could It Be?”: Untethered Voices in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood2026-03-13text/htmlen-US“Again the Sound. What Could It Be?”: Untethered Voices in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®761562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Pain and Principle in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree: Testing the Ethical Imagination of the American Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985537
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On january 5, 1906, the front page of the Washington Post featured an open letter from distinguished Harvard art professor Charles Eliot Norton, advocating his support for euthanasia “in the case of a mortal disease, such, for example, as cancer when it has reached the stage of incessant severe pain and when the patient desires to die” (“Kill to End Suffering”). Norton, the preeminent humanist and “beloved friend” of Edith Wharton,1 decried the “superstition” prohibiting euthanasia: “There is no ground in reason to hold every human life as inviolably sacred, and to be preserved” (“Kill to End Suffering”). The letter, addressed to Anna S. Hall of Cincinnati, marked the highest profile endorsement in Hall’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmallPain and Principle in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree: Testing the Ethical Imagination of the American Novel2026-03-13text/htmlen-USPain and Principle in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree: Testing the Ethical Imagination of the American Novel2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®974212026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Afterword: American Modernity and Antimodernity, Then and Now
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985538
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Whatever happened to the american 1890s? in late twentieth-century literary studies, they seemed inescapable; major books on the period by Amy Kaplan, Alan Trachtenberg, Mark Seltzer, Kenneth Warren, Martha Banta, Walter Benn Michaels, June Howard, and others played an instrumental role in American literary studies’ now firmly entrenched turn toward historicist and culturally focused approaches. The era’s fiction seemed ideally suited for the task; typically identified with realism and naturalism, it engaged directly with its rapidly shifting social milieu in a way earlier “romances,” it seemed, had not. The issues the texts raised were all too familiar: income inequality and labor strife, the struggle for racial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/311/image/coversmallAfterword: American Modernity and Antimodernity, Then and Now2026-03-13text/htmlen-USAfterword: American Modernity and Antimodernity, Then and Now2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®552772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13