Project MUSE®: Studies in American Fiction - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in American Fiction.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1, no. 1 (1973) -- through to current issue (with a gap in Vol. 14)Latest Articles: Studies in American FictionTWOProject MUSE®Studies in American Fiction2158-58060091-8083Latest articles in Studies in American Fiction. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Catherized History and National Identity in Death Comes for the Archbishop
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984785
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Having gained recognition for her frontier novels, Willa Cather staked out new territory in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), exploring the missionary work of Bishop Latour, a French priest establishing the Church’s authority in newly annexed New Mexico. Cather based Bishop Latour on Jean Baptiste Lamy, the first Archbishop of New Mexico, whom she learned about during her trips to New Mexico in 1910 and 1920. During these trips, she paid homage to statues of the Archbishop and extensively researched the history of New Mexico, including documented records of Lamy’s church construction that served as sources of inspiration for Cather’s novel. In an essay, Cather acknowledged that she connected the novel to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478/image/coversmallThe Catherized History and National Identity in Death Comes for the Archbishop2026-03-06text/htmlen-USThe Catherized History and National Identity in Death Comes for the Archbishop2026-03-062026TWOProject MUSE®1029092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-06Wounding the Heteropatriarchy: Queered and Disabled Histories in Caballero and Forgetting the Alamo
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984786
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In Loving in the War Years, Cherríe Moraga warns readers not to divorce liberatory movements from the social and political marginalization to which those movements respond. That is, she warns us not to forget in our loving the war that makes such loving so difficult and so necessary. While Moraga notes that “every oppressed group needs to imagine through the help of history and mythology a world where our oppression did not seem the preordained order,” she cautions against “believing in this ideal past or imagined future so thoroughly and single-mindedly that finding solutions to present-day inequities loses priority, or we attempt to create too-easy solutions for the pain we feel today.”1 Liberatory recollections
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478/image/coversmallWounding the Heteropatriarchy: Queered and Disabled Histories in Caballero and Forgetting the Alamo2026-03-06text/htmlen-USWounding the Heteropatriarchy: Queered and Disabled Histories in Caballero and Forgetting the Alamo2026-03-062026TWOProject MUSE®577032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-06Lines of Flight, Lines of Force: Thomas Pynchon & Star Wars
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984787
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If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist . . .Just cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there!On May 29, 2005, Jeffrey S. Lehman, legal scholar and president of Cornell University, warned the school’s graduating students against “moral tunnel vision” and the destructive pull of the proverbial “Dark Side.”3 His advice drew on two contrasting sources: George Lucas’s Star Wars saga (at a moment when Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was breaking box office records) and the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, one of Cornell’s most notable literary alumni. The opening sequence of Lehman’s commencement speech is peppered with references to the multibillion-dollar space fantasy before it shifts focus to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478/image/coversmallLines of Flight, Lines of Force: Thomas Pynchon & Star Wars2026-03-06text/htmlen-USLines of Flight, Lines of Force: Thomas Pynchon & Star Wars2026-03-062026TWOProject MUSE®1477362026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-06Agribusiness Chronotopes: Farmworker Experiences of Exploitative Time and Space in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984788
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Rigoberto González’s 2003 novel, Crossing Vines, depicts a day in the life of several migrant farmworkers in the fictionalized Caliente Valley, a stand-in for Coachella Valley, located in Southern California’s Colorado desert region. The centrality of the region is apparent from the author’s book dedication: “This is dedicated to the grape farmworkers of the Coachella Valley, California. It is dedicated to my pop and my grandma María.”1 This dedication is effectively the novel’s first statement, after the title, and as such, it immediately foreshadows the central role of this agricultural space and the real farmworkers who inspired the work. Following the dedication, González credits Tomás Rivera’s groundbreaking
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478/image/coversmallAgribusiness Chronotopes: Farmworker Experiences of Exploitative Time and Space in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines2026-03-06text/htmlen-USAgribusiness Chronotopes: Farmworker Experiences of Exploitative Time and Space in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines2026-03-062026TWOProject MUSE®907732026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-06Race, Crowds, and Resistance in Lovecraft’s Country: From Poe’s Old Old Weird to Victor LaValle’s New Black Gothic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984789
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“America is truly Lovecraft’s country: fearful because it cannot love.”1Victor LaValle’s horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) follows Tommy Tester, a small-time Harlem hustler in the 1920s. After his father is killed by a private detective who works with city police, Tommy joins a criminal cult. Eventually, with cunning wiles and a simmering rage, he gains access to occult powers and adopts the apocalyptic role of “Black Tom” to exact otherworldly revenge. The destruction leaves tenement buildings in ruin and dozens of officers dead. In the wake of this chaos, as cops field public inquiries, the narrator mentions one particularly nosey onlooker:A man originally from Rhode Island but now living in Brooklyn
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478/image/coversmallRace, Crowds, and Resistance in Lovecraft’s Country: From Poe’s Old Old Weird to Victor LaValle’s New Black Gothic2026-03-06text/htmlen-USRace, Crowds, and Resistance in Lovecraft’s Country: From Poe’s Old Old Weird to Victor LaValle’s New Black Gothic2026-03-062026TWOProject MUSE®1318522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-06Falling Women and Empty Skies: Returning to 9/11 in Fiction by Daniel Alarcon, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Ottessa Moshfegh
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984790
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“To misrecognize is not to err, but to project qualities onto something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having those qualities—which it might or might not have.”In 2009, Richard Schechner wrote a wide-ranging essay for PMLA considering the implications of framing the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks as works of transgressive or avant-garde art. The hijackers aimed “to stage a stunning media event” for “as large a spectatorship in the West as possible,” and Schechner shares his experience of watching the aftermath of the planes hitting the towers with friends and neighbors from within his apartment in Manhattan.2 He describes their feelings collectively as they observe, then reflects on his own:From our
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478/image/coversmallFalling Women and Empty Skies: Returning to 9/11 in Fiction by Daniel Alarcon, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Ottessa Moshfegh2026-03-06text/htmlen-USFalling Women and Empty Skies: Returning to 9/11 in Fiction by Daniel Alarcon, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Ottessa Moshfegh2026-03-062026TWOProject MUSE®1092502026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-06Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984791
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Kendall Dinniene is a Hughes Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Southern Methodist University. Their work focuses broadly on race, health, and embodiment in 20th- and 21st-century Black American and Latinx literature and film. Kendall’s research has appeared in venues including Fat Studies and Ethnic Studies Review. Their current book project uncovers the way that some contemporary American artists trouble medicalized discourses about excess body weight to tell liberatory stories about race.Jeffrey Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University. He teaches and writes about 20th- and 21st-century American fiction, and he is interested primarily in how shifts in post-1990s life in the U.S.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/478/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2026-03-06text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2026-03-062026TWOProject MUSE®50742026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-06