Project MUSE®: American Literary History - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Literary History.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 12 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: American Literary HistoryTWOProject MUSE®American Literary History1468-43650896-7148Latest articles in American Literary History. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Describing Desire: Ekphrasis and Queer Sexuality in Fitz-Greene Halleck's "Red Jacket"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983950
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The popularity of Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) suggests that frontier romances fueled overdetermined, often contradictory fantasies involving historical retreat, regional travel, and cross-cultural encounters—settler-colonial desires foundational to literature of the burgeoning US republic.1 Writers and artists often depicted the prairie as the figurative margin of the settler state where one could witness the emergent formations of citizenship, class, gender, race, and sexuality firsthand. There, tropes such as the "Vanishing Indian"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallDescribing Desire: Ekphrasis and Queer Sexuality in Fitz-Greene Halleck's "Red Jacket"2026-02-28text/htmlen-USDescribing Desire: Ekphrasis and Queer Sexuality in Fitz-Greene Halleck's "Red Jacket"2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®924072026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Gospel of John Marrant: Conjuring Christianity in the Black Atlantic by Alphonso F. Saville IV (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983951
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John Marrant's short, peripatetic life took him to several of Britain's North American colonies, with a stint in England after a forced tour at sea with the Royal Navy. He did not, however, make it to Africa. That was reserved for the Black Loyalist congregation he established in Nova Scotia in the 1780s among struggling refugees from Britain's lost war. In 1791, the year of Marrant's death, John Clarkson recruited around 1200 of these people to travel to Sierra Leone and revive the colony started by abolitionists in 1781 as a "Province of Freedom." However, echoes of Africa, argues Alphonso Saville, pervade Marrant's life and writings. Published in the Duke University Press series "Religious Cultures of African
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Gospel of John Marrant: Conjuring Christianity in the Black Atlantic by Alphonso F. Saville IV (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Gospel of John Marrant: Conjuring Christianity in the Black Atlantic by Alphonso F. Saville IV (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®125372026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice by Jess A. Goldberg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983952
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Jess A. Goldberg's Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice represents a significant turn in how literary scholars might think about the work that they can do with an academic monograph. It does much of what a standard academic book does: Goldberg draws from the fields of Black studies, formalism, and abolitionist theory to develop a method of "abolitionist close reading" (ix). And, Abolition Time develops this practice in ways that will feel very familiar to literary scholars: the book is divided into four chapters, centered on close readings of texts. Each chapter develops a unique, but interrelated "poetics of justice": accumulation, perforation, witnessing, and breath. I will spend some time in this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallAbolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice by Jess A. Goldberg (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USAbolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice by Jess A. Goldberg (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®112272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement by Michaël Roy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983953
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This monograph, self-styled the "first book-length examination of juvenile abolitionism as it happened on the ground," provides a concise, accessible, and engrossing history of children's involvement in the antebellum American antislavery movement (5). Beyond its introduction, the book is organized into five chapters, covering the origins of juvenile abolitionism (Black resistance to slavery and, later, the temperance movement); the varieties of antislavery children's literature (poetry, fiction, oration, life writing, among others); the formation of juvenile antislavery societies (including the very first, the Juvenile Garrison Independent Society, established by young Black Bostonians in 1831); antislavery
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallYoung Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement by Michaël Roy (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USYoung Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement by Michaël Roy (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®107212026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Nineteenth-Century African American Speeches in Britain and Ireland ed. by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah-Rose Murray (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983954
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Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah-Rose Murray's Nineteenth-Century African American Speeches in Britain and Ireland is a splendid collection of eighty primary sources of African American political activism. The two Frederick Douglass scholars document nineteenth-century African American lecture tours and other speaking engagements in Great Britain and Ireland. Superbly edited, the volume is an excellent source book for research (and teaching) on transatlantic African American antislavery, antilynching, and civil rights activism in the decades prior to and after the Civil War. In addition to chronicling the public speaking engagements of 40 African American lecturers and orators, the volume also provides important
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallNineteenth-Century African American Speeches in Britain and Ireland ed. by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah-Rose Murray (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USNineteenth-Century African American Speeches in Britain and Ireland ed. by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah-Rose Murray (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®112062026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai ed. by Dianne Ashton with Melissa R. Klapper (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983955
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Emma Mordecai's diary of six critical months detailing the demise of the Confederacy and six momentous weeks after its fall presents a canvas on which to measure Southern nationalism as it filtered through the perceptions of a Jewish spinster from Richmond. Already fifty-one when the war began, Emma (1812–1906), the sixth of Jacob and Rebecca Mordecai's seven children (and the twelfth of her father's thirteen), had lived through romantic heartbreak, watched siblings convert to Christianity, and endured the regional separation of family branches long before she recorded the late-war turbulence of 1864–65. Dianne Ashton's edition of this snapshot of Emma Mordecai's long life reveals an intense devotion to Confederate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai ed. by Dianne Ashton with Melissa R. Klapper (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai ed. by Dianne Ashton with Melissa R. Klapper (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®110482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Pudd'nhead Wilson: Manuscript and Revised Versions with "Those Extraordinary Twins" by Mark Twain (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983956
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Since May 2022, the Center for Mark Twain Studies has hosted ninety-nine presentations by scholars as part of our conferences, symposia, and lecture series. Fully ten of those papers have centered on Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). That makes it the most-discussed work by Twain to be part of our in-person programming during this period. In fact, Pudd'nhead presentations more than double the nearest runners-up: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court (1889), and The Gilded Age (1873).I regard this surge in scholarship as a side effect of increased classroom adoption at both the secondary and collegiate level going back at least a decade. Sometimes Pudd'nhead Wilson has been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallPudd'nhead Wilson: Manuscript and Revised Versions with "Those Extraordinary Twins" by Mark Twain (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USPudd'nhead Wilson: Manuscript and Revised Versions with "Those Extraordinary Twins" by Mark Twain (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®115872026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature by Amanda M. Greenwell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983958
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The Child Gaze is an original and provocative study focused on literary representations of "child acts of looking" in US literature published from the 1930s to the present. Greenwell begins in the 1930s because it was not until then that a middle-class ideal of childhood was extended to all children (4): child labor laws were finally in place; children's literature was fully institutionalized as its own genre of publishing; and all children were, theoretically, understood as "innocent" and in need of education and protection (although this did not fully apply to African American children, a fact that partly animates Greenwell's study). Moreover, as Greenwell notes of the books she discusses, citing Carolyn
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature by Amanda M. Greenwell (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature by Amanda M. Greenwell (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®118172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Classics in Black and White: Black Colleges, Classics Education, Resistance, and Assimilation by Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O'Connor (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983959
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If I had to choose one word to characterize US higher education in the twenty-first century, I might go with precarity. Every college and university has horror stories of austerity measures imposed after the financial crisis, the turmoil of the Covid-19 pandemic, and widespread panic about generative artificial intelligence. Many administrators and state legislators have sought to weaken tenure protections, slash funding for humanities departments, and eliminate liberal arts programs and university presses. This precarity is the defining feature of academia for many younger and mid-career scholars and it is not likely to abate any time soon. Students are beset with anxiety about earning a "marketable" degree, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Classics in Black and White: Black Colleges, Classics Education, Resistance, and Assimilation by Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O'Connor (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Classics in Black and White: Black Colleges, Classics Education, Resistance, and Assimilation by Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O'Connor (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®121712026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance by Kellen Hoxworth (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983960
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The rise of global cultural history has been exhilarating. Books like Lisa Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) have reimagined the scope of the individual academic project. Yet such work can be formidably demanding: not only mastering multiple fields, but explaining them anew. Necessarily, the insights of the discipline must be founded in synthesis, braiding several scholarly traditions. Superficiality is one great risk, as is selectiveness, or oversimplification. Another is the unintentional emulation of the extractive economies the work sets out to expose. In a very harsh light, the notes to such studies can read as a register of plunder—of local archives, as well as the knowledge of specialists and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallTransoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance by Kellen Hoxworth (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USTransoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance by Kellen Hoxworth (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®124192026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Sophie Maríñez (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983961
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What does art remember that official history tries to forget? Such is the long-running preoccupation of subaltern Atlantic and Hemispheric cultural studies, one that animates such widely read works as Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past (1995), Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), and Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother (2006), as well as now-canonical expressions of resistant mobility and perduration within transnational Black studies such as "the changing same" (Amiri Baraka, Houston Baker, Deborah McDowell), "difference and repetition" (Gilles Deleuze, Édouard Glissant), and "fractal structure" (Paul Gilroy).Spirals in the Caribbean is the latest entry into this broader conversation, one
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallSpirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Sophie Maríñez (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USSpirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Sophie Maríñez (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®99012026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place by Sandhya Shukla (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983962
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For avid readers of Harlem's literature from the New Negro movement onward, Sandhya Shukla's Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place is the most satisfying kind of book. Its argument has been hidden in plain sight and is clearly discernible in the work of writers Shukla discusses at length, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, or Piri Thomas, as well as others who are often associated with the neighborhood, like Wallace Thurman, Arturo Schomburg, Nella Larsen, or Arna Bontemps. Indeed, upon reflection, one wonders why nobody had already tackled the problems posed by this nuanced study, which recognizes Harlem as simultaneously a space of Black belonging and a space of wide-ranging cosmopolitanism, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallCross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place by Sandhya Shukla (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USCross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place by Sandhya Shukla (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®105812026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College by Danica Savonick (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983964
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Danica Savonick makes the stakes of Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan clear in the first, beautiful line of the preface: "This book is about what free college makes possible" (ix). Open Admissions traces this pursuit of the possible in the literary, pedagogical, and political work of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde beginning when they each taught at the City College of New York in the late 1960s and early '70s. Savonick studies the period 1965–1976, the years of the fight for and implementation of tuition-free public college in the City University of New York system. The temporal reach of this book, though, is far broader: Savonick reveals the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallOpen Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College by Danica Savonick (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USOpen Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College by Danica Savonick (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®120262026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28"From Boys to Men": The Boy Problem and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series by Gregory M. Pfitzer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983965
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In the early twentieth century, semi-credentialed experts on boyhood, or "boyologists," fretted over the so-called "boy problem," a mishmash of anxieties about masculinity, juvenile delinquency, and cultural decline, rooted in a pseudo-evolutionary discourse of boy savagery. In the language of institutional and literary boyology—and the work of character building to which it links (think Scouting, the YMCA)—the boy is both the epitome of evolutionary development and a precarious, unstable figure at risk of losing his way along the journey to white male estate. Boyology did not fade away with the discrediting of pseudo-evolutionary thinking; rather, it shifted registers, still shoring up ideals of white masculinity
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmall"From Boys to Men": The Boy Problem and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series by Gregory M. Pfitzer (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-US"From Boys to Men": The Boy Problem and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series by Gregory M. Pfitzer (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®107332026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac ed. by Steven Belletto (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983966
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The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, a collection that grew out of a Beat Studies Association conference on the 2022 centenary of Kerouac's birth, is a cornucopia of current, high-quality scholarship on this important writer. Its contents support Steven Belletto's claim that Kerouac's writing "still retains the capacity to surprise and delight" through the many ways that "Kerouac's work is constantly changing and evolving—even after his death—because of the insights of readers and the efforts of researchers" (2). Yet however much the book will fascinate Kerouac specialists, its value is not limited to niche studies of Kerouac and Beat literature. It also connects, albeit largely implicitly, to many broader
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac ed. by Steven Belletto (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac ed. by Steven Belletto (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®120042026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Midcentury Minor Novel: American Fiction, 1945–1965 by Michael Kalisch (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983967
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It is understating things to say that in this contemporary moment of increasing authoritarianism worldwide, the "crisis of the Humanities," and the erosion of serious, rich, complex political critique with traction in the public sphere, academic, literary criticism finds itself in a bit of a quandary. The flourishing of recent interest in the institutional contexts within which literature is made (including works by James English on literary prizes, Sarah Brouillette on the sociology of literature, Mark McGurl's The Program Era [2009] and John Guillory's Professing Criticism [2022]) testifies to our renewed engagement with the University as a crucial mediating site that shapes our critical tendencies and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Midcentury Minor Novel: American Fiction, 1945–1965 by Michael Kalisch (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Midcentury Minor Novel: American Fiction, 1945–1965 by Michael Kalisch (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®115842026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Complete Poetry of James Agee ed. by Michael A. Lofaro and Jesse Graves (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983968
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James Agee (1909–1955) engaged international modernism by way of regional and national responses crossing several literary genres. At the time of his untimely death these profuse and varied accomplishments were widely appreciated, but Agee was not yet recognized as a major figure of American and southern late modernism. Over the following decades his literary works were republished, collected, and edited, while scholarly engagement and critical appreciation richly responded to them. Many contributions to these later developments were made in The Works of James Agee series from the University of Tennessee Press (2008–2024). Earlier volumes have provided scholarly texts of Agee's only novel, A Death in the Family
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallComplete Poetry of James Agee ed. by Michael A. Lofaro and Jesse Graves (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USComplete Poetry of James Agee ed. by Michael A. Lofaro and Jesse Graves (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®90502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Telling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy by Harilaos Stecopoulos (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983969
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Twentieth-century US literary diplomacy took a wide range of forms. No single institution housed it; no unified outlook shaped it; nor did it compromise any major writers involved with it, at least not against their will. In his well-researched account of it, Harry Stecopoulos offers six meaty case studies that reveal the variety while assessing the effect that diplomatic work had on what writers wrote.In the liberal internationalist spirit of the FDR Administration, as World War II raged, the poet Archibald MacLeish created radio plays that presented early encounters between Europeans and American Indians as a model for peaceful diversity for the postwar globe. After the war, on the CIA dole, Ralph Ellison and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallTelling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy by Harilaos Stecopoulos (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USTelling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy by Harilaos Stecopoulos (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®114972026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration: From Einstein to the Present by Margaret Greaves (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983970
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Have you seen the photograph of the Earth taken from space? Of course you have, many times, all the time. The image is ubiquitous. There was a moment, though, not so long ago, when no one had seen it.Margaret Greaves's intriguingly titled study, Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration, recovers the moment, and its aftermath, when the image was eagerly anticipated, when indeed it seemed like it might prove to be epoch defining, even prophetic. Samantha Harvey's recent Booker-prize winning novel Orbital (2023) captures the irresistible wonder, but, at this late stage in the game, with a good deal of pathos, too. Greaves recovers the moment in a singular fashion by showing the relationship between a discourse of space
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallLyric Poetry and Space Exploration: From Einstein to the Present by Margaret Greaves (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USLyric Poetry and Space Exploration: From Einstein to the Present by Margaret Greaves (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®109132026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Revolutionary Poetics: The Rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement by Sarah RudeWalker (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983971
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Revolutionary Poetics revisits well-known poetry of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) to claim the movement's rhetorical success. Reading such artists as Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubhuti, and Sarah Webster Fabio as "poet-rhetors," Sarah RudeWalker invites us to evaluate their poems as acts toward a clear cultural agenda. Integrating Aristotelian, African, and African American concepts of storytelling, discourse, and persuasion, RudeWalker argues that a rhetorical framework reveals the BAM's efficacy on its own terms: it achieved the cultural nationalist agenda of moving Black audiences toward a mindset of Black Power and pride.RudeWalker aims a pointed corrective to the skepticism that has persisted amid the BAM's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallRevolutionary Poetics: The Rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement by Sarah RudeWalker (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USRevolutionary Poetics: The Rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement by Sarah RudeWalker (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®119982026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Fantasies of Nina Simone by Jordan Alexander Stein (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983972
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"The shelf of books about Nina Simone grows heavy" (3). So observes Jordan Alexander Stein at the outset of his absorbing new book Fantasies of Nina Simone. Indeed, if you have been paying attention, you will have noticed a recent onrush of new biographies, scholarship, and narrative and documentary films examining Simone's life, artistry, and politico-cultural significance. Since her 2003 death, Simone only seems to have gained greater visibility in popular culture. Hop-hop artists routinely sample her music, and her regal image appears on t-shirts such as the one worn by actor Issa Rae on the HBO series Insecure. Even if they don't know much about her music, students in my pop music courses now routinely arrive
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallFantasies of Nina Simone by Jordan Alexander Stein (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USFantasies of Nina Simone by Jordan Alexander Stein (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®103482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983973
<p></p>
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) launched modern American environmentalism by revealing that pesticides are biocides. While turning the pages of the book, millions realized that the insecticides they'd been buying at grocery stores—and that were raining down on food crops and municipal water sources from spraying campaigns sponsored by the federal government—are what we now call "forever chemicals" that can accumulate in living body tissue until they disrupt the biological processes that support life itself. Carson's book became an instant international bestseller. It caught the attention of President Kennedy; landed Carson on primetime TV; in televised Senate hearings, led to the banning of DDT and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallRachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USRachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®126292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett by Ashley Lawson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983974
<p></p>
Ashley Lawson's absorbing comparative study of the many suggestive overlaps between the creative and professional lives of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett opens by discussing a tantalizingly brief encounter between the two most prominent of her subjects. In June 1943, the then-22-year-old Highsmith "tagged along" with a friend to visit Jackson and her husband, the academic and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who were living in Greenwich Village. Highsmith's interest, Lawson relates, "was mostly in Hyman, whose employer, The New Yorker, had a frustrating habit of rejecting her story commissions" (1). The young author found Hyman "horrible"—her notorious antisemitism is cited as a possible factor
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallOn Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett by Ashley Lawson (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USOn Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett by Ashley Lawson (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®101112026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28All Y'all: Queering Southernness in US Fiction, 1980–2020 by Heidi Siegrist (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983975
<p></p>
Heidi Siegrist's title, with its vernacular inclusiveness, deftly conveys the hopefulness that suffuses the volume—no simple accomplishment at a moment when, as she notes from her opening page, "LGBTQ rights in the United States have been dangerously curtailed most dramatically and visibly in southern states," including "drag bans," "blocks to gender-affirming care," and even "Florida's 'don't say gay' laws" (1–2). For Siegrist, however, identifying "homophobia as especially southern can also obscure the queer lives that flourish" in the region (5)—an alarm raised by Michael Bibler in the essay collection Keywords for Southern Studies (2016) and since amplified by Leisa D. Meyer in a review essay for The Journal of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallAll Y'all: Queering Southernness in US Fiction, 1980–2020 by Heidi Siegrist (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USAll Y'all: Queering Southernness in US Fiction, 1980–2020 by Heidi Siegrist (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®113972026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment by Marcel DeCoste (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983976
<p></p>
Marcel DeCoste's Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment offers an original and groundbreaking engagement with the Catholic elements of McCarthy's work and their influence on his political, social, and ethical commitments. For DeCoste, McCarthy's career-long commitment to the philosophical and ethical values of Catholicism informs his critique of the destructive and hubristic forces of "America's Enlightenment faith in progress through individual autonomy, technological innovation, and expansion of territories and marketplaces" and illuminates McCarthy's visions of a humbler, less destructive "alternative path" (19, 18) for human life. In forwarding this argument, DeCoste
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallProfessing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment by Marcel DeCoste (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USProfessing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment by Marcel DeCoste (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®119632026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump by Douglas Dowland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983977
<p></p>
Political theorists have long emphasized that both populism and polarization depend on collective identity constructions that divide the population into in-group and out-group, friend and foe. According to Douglas Dowland, the construction of collectivity around "us" and "them" has not just shaped political culture of the past half century but US literature as well. His 2024 study, We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump, is an unofficial follow-up and complementary volume to Weak Nationalisms: Affect and Nonfiction in Postwar America (2019). In both, Dowland studies US nonfiction since the Vietnam era to analyze constructions of "us" and "them." He focuses on the rhetorical operation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallWe, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump by Douglas Dowland (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USWe, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump by Douglas Dowland (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®119572026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence by Maia Gil'Adí (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983978
<p></p>
Early on in their breakthrough monograph Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculation and the Aesthetics of Violence, Maia Gil'Adí breaks down what it means to be "yearning for disaster" (3). Borrowed from Michael Zapata's 2020 novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, this complicated feeling, a "juxtaposition of catastrophe with the pleasurable and fantastical" (3), highlights the central tensions within Gil'Adí's unruly archive of (mostly) Latinx speculative portrayals of violence. The book digs up and deciphers doom patterns, or "textual forms and narrative strategies such as thematic repetition, nonlinear narration, character fragmentation, unresolved plots, tropes and archetypes that, in these literatures, consistently
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallDoom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence by Maia Gil'Adí (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USDoom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence by Maia Gil'Adí (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®102992026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction by Samuel Ginsburg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983979
<p></p>
Samuel Ginsburg's The Cyborg Caribbean blends urgency with coolness, ushering readers to consider contemporary Caribbean science fiction, a literary subgenre that explores the futuristic unknown. Gone in this refreshing analysis are the days of Antonio Benítez Rojo's The Repeating Island (1992), which portrayed the Caribbean through images of female streetwalkers on narrow Havana streets. In between Caribbean swinging hips, Benítez Rojo argued, Western anxieties about the end times dissipate. Ginsburg offers a different perspective. With The Cyborg Caribbean we face the horror of bodies being severed and electrocuted, nuclear ghosts, financial dominatrixes, and other elements of the repertoire of what Mayra Santos
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction by Samuel Ginsburg (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction by Samuel Ginsburg (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®94312026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983980
<p></p>
Concise and well-researched, Jordan S. Carroll's Speculative Whiteness frames the white nationalist interest in sf narrative and its interpretation as a bid for the future. In the opening pages, Carroll offers a history lesson about what connects the appeal of speculative thinking to twentieth-century Germany fascists and US white supremacists, illustrating just how the twenty-first century, US-based alt-right follows a similar path. Alongside the histories it offers, Speculative Whiteness undertakes a discourse analysis of fascist interpretations of sf. Carroll analyzes blog posts, podcasts, and other alt-right ephemera to understand the use of speculative writing and criticism in the project of white supremacy.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallSpeculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USSpeculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®104242026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Notes on Vermin by Caroline Hovanec (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983981
<p></p>
Caroline Hovanec's lucid and insightful Notes on Vermin investigates forms of life including "rats, cockroaches, pigeons, mosquitos, worms, and other vile creatures," creatures who elicit "aversion and disgust. They invade our homes, scavenge our trash, devour our food stores, and contaminate the spaces we want to keep clean." In doing so, vermin "make a mockery of our efforts to dominate and control nature," Hovanec insists, even as they draw out human behaviors that reveal often-repressed dimensions of who we are and how we think. Hovanec focuses on "twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and critical theory" (1), and she is canny about the particularities of this time period. Her five
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallNotes on Vermin by Caroline Hovanec (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USNotes on Vermin by Caroline Hovanec (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®115672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Lit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music ed. by Ryan Hibbett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983982
<p></p>
On a hot Tuesday morning in 1970 amid the deafening buzz of a cicada infestation, Princeton University formally welcomed Bob Dylan into the academy, declaring him an honorary doctor of humane letters. It was a comedic, even slapstick, affair, as Dylan first ignored the invitation, then abruptly accepted a few days before the ceremony, and bolted from the procession just after donning his robes. Only David Crosby (who may have been tripping on acid) saved the day by telling the songwriter not to disappoint his mother. Dylan glumly rejoined the line, accepted his ceremonial hood, then headed for the exit to write a song about the surreal affair.As was the case with the 2016 Nobel committee, Princeton's leaders were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallLit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music ed. by Ryan Hibbett (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USLit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music ed. by Ryan Hibbett (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®104742026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Man Woman Cherry Tree Yellow: Queer Elsewheres, Black Elsewhens, Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Queer Eighteenth-Century Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983983
<p></p>
Why the eighteenth century? Why the EIGHTEENTH century? As a feminist and queer studies scholar, I've been asked this question many times. In graduate school in the 1980s, at the height of the post-structuralist turn in literary studies, I learned from my Marxist-feminist dissertation director, Laura Brown, that a skeptical but attentive reading of texts that revile, dismiss, or satirize women can be a source of knowledge, not just about the enormous and violent cultural labor it takes to create a male-dominated society, but also about the powers and capacities of those feminized and vilified by misogyny. Representations, testimonies, and observations, often problematic ones, are the literary and archival traces of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallMan Woman Cherry Tree Yellow: Queer Elsewheres, Black Elsewhens, Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Queer Eighteenth-Century Studies2026-02-28text/htmlen-USMan Woman Cherry Tree Yellow: Queer Elsewheres, Black Elsewhens, Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Queer Eighteenth-Century Studies2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®360872026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Climate Disorientation and Poe's Uncanny Atmospheres
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983984
<p></p>
In its final pages, Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) depicts a strange, racially fractured climate.1 Approaching the South Pole in a stolen canoe, accompanied by a Black Indigenous captive named Nu-Nu, Poe's protagonist and his companion, Dirk Peters, enter a "region of novelty and wonder" (148). This climate is characterized by "soundless winds," a milky, near-boiling ocean, and a "white ashy shower" falling from the sky (150). As they advance, Nu-Nu dies, seemingly without cause, lying face down on the bottom of the boat. The surviving pair continue southward, where they meet, in the novel's final line, "a shrouded human figure" with "skin … the perfect whiteness of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallClimate Disorientation and Poe's Uncanny Atmospheres2026-02-28text/htmlen-USClimate Disorientation and Poe's Uncanny Atmospheres2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®1039952026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Careful People: Nick Carraway on Class and Authority—Then and Now
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983985
<p></p>
I made my final decision about America—that freedom has produced the greatest tyranny under the sun. I'm still a socialist but sometimes I dread that things will grow worse and worse the more the people nominally rule. The strong are too strong for us and the weak too weak."Careless people": they are among the most renowned words in American literature. Reporting on his late encounter with Tom Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick Carraway uses the phrase to sum up his estimate of Tom's character and that of Tom's wife Daisy. "They smashed up things and creatures," Nick reports:
and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallCareful People: Nick Carraway on Class and Authority—Then and Now2026-02-28text/htmlen-USCareful People: Nick Carraway on Class and Authority—Then and Now2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®1048272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Lyric Histories
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983986
<p></p>
At a recent reading in Indianapolis, acclaimed Affrilachian poet Mitchell L.H. Douglas prompted former Indiana poet laureate and Poetry magazine editor Adrian Matejka to discuss the significance of his award-winning collection The Big Smoke (2013), which reimagines the life and legacy of the first Black boxing heavyweight champion,
Jack Johnson, and the prevalence of twenty-first-century Black historical persona poetry more generally. Matejka observed that it took two years of intensive research to write the first poem about Johnson and six more years of sifting through archival materials, drafting, and revising to finish the collection. While The Big Smoke is a remarkable work of art, Matejka is not alone in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallLyric Histories2026-02-28text/htmlen-USLyric Histories2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®401302026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28What Instagram and Community Colleges Tell Us about the Future of Digital Humanities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983987
<p></p>
"The steady state of DH, which I once believed was to be fully subsumed within the humanities, now looks much more likely to involve the diffusion of humanistic knowledge into disciplines that understand themselves to be constitutively quantitative and computational."In the paratextual beginning was the commentary. The commentary was long, and it was difficult, and it was important to a subset of readers. There were only a few books that demanded it, and most readers could (and did) get by without it. Later came the review. The review was shorter, but it was attached, as a form, to more books and relevant to a larger group of readers. Then, on the side of the author: the interview, the lecture, and the book tour.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallWhat Instagram and Community Colleges Tell Us about the Future of Digital Humanities2026-02-28text/htmlen-USWhat Instagram and Community Colleges Tell Us about the Future of Digital Humanities2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®277602026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Style Degree Zero: Incommensurable Bonds in Cather and Cameron
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983988
<p></p>
Willa Cather framed her seventh novel, The Professor's House (1925), with a scene of climactic revelation at its heart. After recounting his quixotic detours through a fictionalized Mesa Verde, Tom Outland's story stops for another look at the canyon, and Cather overcharges the prose with ekphrastic stylings—purple rocks and sunset flames, the improbable ruin set "in a gold haze against its dark cavern." Tom, for his part, sits alone on his perch above Cliff City, witnessing one of those cracks in the veil of experience that recur in Cather's novels and stories. The focal shifts that follow are a little hard to track, in part because they jostle the stability of both the character and the novel's frame. Tom reports
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallStyle Degree Zero: Incommensurable Bonds in Cather and Cameron2026-02-28text/htmlen-USStyle Degree Zero: Incommensurable Bonds in Cather and Cameron2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®384392026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28High School English and the Making of American Readers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983989
<p></p>
The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars.1 While scholars of education have written a great deal on the pedagogy of secondary school English, in the field of literary studies, that classroom—the place where more people read and discuss and write about more literature more often than anywhere else—is nearly invisible. Consolidated in the late nineteenth century, the American high school system grew enormously over the course of the twentieth century, enrolling just over 50 percent of adolescents in 1929 and more than 90 percent from the 1960s onwards. As early as the 1920s, 93 percent of students in US public
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallHigh School English and the Making of American Readers2026-02-28text/htmlen-USHigh School English and the Making of American Readers2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®1264692026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Frances E. W. Harper's "Death of Zombi": A Palmares for North Americans
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983990
<p></p>
In her 1871 volume, Poems, Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911) celebrates the end of the Civil War, highlighting the courage of African Americans in the face of unspeakable disaster.1 Among her tributes to the war's heroes, one poem, "Death of Zombi," might seem a digression. It honors "Zombi," now called Zumbi (1655–95), a little-known seventeenth-century Afro-Brazilian leader. As Harper's subtitle helpfully indicates, he was "The Chief of a Negro Kingdom in South America," whose stronghold, Palmares (1605–94), was destroyed in battle with Portuguese colonial militias (Poems 12). Although her title announces "Zombi" as its primary focus, Harper seems equally concerned with the loss of Palmares, an African diaspora
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallFrances E. W. Harper's "Death of Zombi": A Palmares for North Americans2026-02-28text/htmlen-USFrances E. W. Harper's "Death of Zombi": A Palmares for North Americans2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®807462026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry by Nicoletta Asciuto (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983991
<p></p>
Marshall McLuhan's foundational essay, "The Medium is the Message" (1964), characterizes electric light as a pervasive and decentralized technology whose development transformed humans' experience of time and space. In Brilliant Modernism, Nicoletta Asciuto unpacks and expands this characterization by considering modern cultures of light—including both the materiality of illumination technologies and the evolving meanings, attitudes, and practices associated with light and its everyday manifestations—alongside their appearance in modernist poetry and art. Her premise for this linkage is that "[m]odern subjectivity [was] not just reactive toward electric light as an external phenomenon. Instead, electric light [was]
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallBrilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry by Nicoletta Asciuto (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USBrilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry by Nicoletta Asciuto (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®116452026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture by Courtney Thorsson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983992
<p></p>
For African American literary studies, archives are nothing new. Storied acts of recovery and reprinting have shaped the field since its institutionalization in the 1970s. Even so, for the past fifteen years, an archival revival has been underway in the field, albeit unevenly. Scholars of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature have been slower to turn to the archives than African Americanists of earlier periods for several reasons, perhaps the most obvious being the contemporaneity of contemporary literature. Because of the typically posthumous and prolonged processes of archive-making, the absence of archives has often plagued the study of African American literature of the past half
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/8/image/coversmallThe Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture by Courtney Thorsson (review)2026-02-28text/htmlen-USThe Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture by Courtney Thorsson (review)2026-02-282026TWOProject MUSE®121262026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-28