STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION最新文献

{"title":"Healthy, Wealthy, and White: The Great War and Shell Shock in Nella Larsen's Passing","authors":"Aaron Shaheen","doi":"10.1353/saf.2022.a920137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2022.a920137","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay sheds new light on the character of <i>Passing</i>’s Brian Redfield, whose restlessness and mood swings bear a striking resemblance to contemporaneous accounts of shell shock among Great War veterans. Brian, himself such a veteran as well as a physician, is so insecure about his wartime past that he looks to Claire Bellew as a model for how to pass successfully, even if the nature of his passing is not based on race, as hers is, but based on a facade of emotional stability. Larsen’s novel reveals how the intertwined discourses of shell shock and racial passing attempted to explain whiteness’s insidious role in America’s postwar “return to normalcy.”</p></p>","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wheatley's Writing on the Wall: Concepts of Mercy and Alternate Literary Histories in Toni Morrison's A Mercy","authors":"Éva Tettenborn","doi":"10.1353/saf.2022.a920141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2022.a920141","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Wheatley’s Writing on the Wall: &lt;span&gt;Concepts of Mercy and Alternate Literary Histories in Toni Morrison’s &lt;em&gt;A Mercy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Éva Tettenborn (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;F&lt;/strong&gt;or those familiar with the African American canon, it may be difficult to read Toni Morrison’s novel &lt;em&gt;A Mercy&lt;/em&gt; (2009) and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; understand it as a form of signifying on African American literary history in general and Phillis Wheatley’s much-anthologized and frequently taught poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” in particular. After all, Wheatley’s poem’s first line reads, “‘Twas mercy brought me from my &lt;em&gt;Pagan&lt;/em&gt; land,”&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and if we know how to listen for it, it echoes throughout Morrison’s novel. Those originally introduced to African American literature through surveys of anthologized works perhaps even identify the term “mercy” as the second word uttered in the chronological canonical presentation of printed works authored by Black women. It appears that Morrison, whose works often serve as the anthologized bookend of the African American women writers’ literary canon up to the early twenty-first century, responds to Wheatley, whose eighteenth-century works are often presented as the foundational bookend of the African American women writers’ tradition as we understand it today. Indeed, Justine Tally identifies Morrison’s novel as “a direct call to one of the most well-known foundational texts of African American literature,” pointing to the poem’s first line as well as to the topical overlap between the two works.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Since this brief remark contains the extent of the current discourse of reading &lt;em&gt;A Mercy&lt;/em&gt; alongside Wheatley’s work, I here offer my analysis of what I consider Morrison’s improvisation on and decolonization of Wheatley’s literary legacy. In so doing, I posit two intertwined claims related to the act of mercy and &lt;em&gt;A Mercy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The novel’s title notwithstanding, I maintain that Morrison’s narrative actually introduces the religious concept of mercy only to reject it as an adequate response to oppressive &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 271]&lt;/strong&gt; systems, while calling instead for areligious acts of intersectional solidarity that serve to truly destabilize oppressive societies and the power differentials on which they rest. I use the term intersectional solidarity to refer to acts of solidarity that recognize rather than gloss over the intersectionality of the respective identities of the characters portrayed in the novel, thus celebrating difference as an ironic source of identification rather than exclusion. The point of intersectional solidarity is to identify with another in need not because of overlapping identity categories but precisely without predicating one’s help on shared identity, thus performing a decolonizing move. I posit that b","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/saf.2022.a920142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2022.a920142","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Notes on Contributors &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Justin Chandler is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. His current research explores the intersections of American pragmatism, the Black radical tradition, and Black speculative fiction. He is the 2023 winner of the Arthur O. Lewis Award from the Society for Utopian Studies. His creative work has appeared in &lt;em&gt;Epiphany&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Hobart&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Jonathan A. Cook is the author of &lt;em&gt;Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s “The Confidence Man&lt;/em&gt;” (1996), &lt;em&gt;Inscrutable Malice: Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of&lt;/em&gt; “&lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick”&lt;/em&gt; (2012), and &lt;em&gt;Neither Believer nor Infidel: Skepticism and Faith in Melville’s Shorter Fiction and Poetry&lt;/em&gt; (2023); he is co-editor of &lt;em&gt;Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion&lt;/em&gt; (2017). He has published widely on Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and other nineteenth-century American writers. His annotated bibliography on the Bible and American literature is available at Oxford Bibliographies Online.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Aaron Shaheen is the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he teaches courses in modernism. His most recent essays have appeared in &lt;em&gt;PMLA&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Modernism/modernity&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Modern Fiction Studies,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Arizona Quarterly.&lt;/em&gt; His most recent monograph is titled &lt;em&gt;Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture&lt;/em&gt; (Oxford University Press, 2020). At present he is at work on a manuscript that examines how Great War mapping innovations influenced American literature of the 1920s and ‘30s.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Preston Taylor Stone (he/they) is Associate Director of Native American Studies at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race &amp; Ethnicity at Stanford University.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Eva Tettenborn is Associate Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, Scranton Campus. She teaches American literature, African American literature, composition, and business writing classes. She serves as a consulting editor at &lt;em&gt;Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction&lt;/em&gt;. Her work on contemporary African American authors has appeared in &lt;em&gt;African American Review&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Callaloo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Critique&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;MELUS&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Obsidian&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Short Story&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Southern Literary Journal, Studies in American Culture&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Transformations&lt;/em&gt;. Together with Stephanie Brown, she co-edited and contributed to &lt;em&gt;Engaging Tradition, Making It New: Essays on Teaching Recent African American Literature&lt;/em&gt; (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Michael T. Wilson is Associate Professor in English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. His work has also app","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Melville, Moby-Dick, and Blasphemy","authors":"Jonathan A. Cook","doi":"10.1353/saf.2022.a920136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2022.a920136","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Melville, &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt;, and Blasphemy &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Jonathan A. Cook (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;O&lt;/strong&gt;n October 1, 1856, the New York editor and publisher Evert Duyckinck wrote in his diary of a visit to his Clinton Street (now East 8&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; Street) residence from a previously estranged literary friend living in the Berkshires, during which visit the two discussed passages from Robert Burton’s &lt;em&gt;Anatomy of Melancholy&lt;/em&gt; and Boccaccio’s &lt;em&gt;Decameron&lt;/em&gt; as well as an incident from the career of the well-known New York Supreme Court judge and spiritualist John Edmonds:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Herman Melville passed the evening with me—fresh from his mountain charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and jargon of all things unknowable—a good stirring evening ploughing deep and bringing to the surface some rich fruits of thought and experience. Melville instanced old Burton as atheistical—in the exquisite irony of his passages on some sacred matters; cited a good story from the Decameron[,] the &lt;em&gt;Enchantment&lt;/em&gt; of the husband in the tree; a story from Judge Edmonds of a prayer meeting of female convicts at Sing Sing which the Judge was invited to witness and agreed to, provided he was introduced where he could not be seen. It was an orgie [sic] of indecency and blasphemy.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;It is not known to which passages in Robert Burton’s &lt;em&gt;Anatomy of Melancholy&lt;/em&gt; Melville was referring; but the allusion to Boccaccio’s &lt;em&gt;Decameron&lt;/em&gt; is clearly to the ninth tale of the seventh day—an obscene story that Chaucer had used as the basis for his Merchant’s Tale in &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;. Melville’s mention of Judge John W. Edmonds (1799–1874) refers to an untraced story from his career as a New York State prison inspector, which began in 1843. Edmonds became a prominent spiritualist in 1851, and served as a justice on the New York State Supreme Court from 1847 to 1853.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It is richly ironic that Duyckinck was commemorating his participation in a prolonged “orgie of indecency and blasphemy” with the sailor-author whose career &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 145]&lt;/strong&gt; he had helped launch, given the fact that as Melville’s closest friend in the New York literary establishment and a devout Episcopalian he had been increasingly concerned about Melville’s religious heterodoxy; just a few years before, he had complained about Ishmael’s remarks on Christianity in his two-part November 1851 &lt;em&gt;Literary World&lt;/em&gt; review of Melville’s new whaling novel and advised his friend to show more respect for the public’s religious sensibilities. Unhappy with Duyckinck’s mixed review of &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt; and his apparent disapproval of Melville’s morally subversive new novel, &lt;em&gt;Pierre&lt;/em&gt;, Melville had in fact had broken off his friendship with Duyckinck in mid-February 1","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"2015 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"One and the same\": Morrison's Queer Phenomenology in Sula","authors":"Preston Taylor Stone","doi":"10.1353/saf.2022.a920140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2022.a920140","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; “One and the same”: &lt;span&gt;Morrison’s Queer Phenomenology in &lt;em&gt;Sula&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Preston Taylor Stone (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Introduction&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;n Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel &lt;em&gt;Sula&lt;/em&gt;, the two protagonists are girlfriends whose relationship crosses boundaries, physical and psychic.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; In childhood, we are told, Nel and Sula find “in each other’s eyes the intimacy they [are] looking for.”&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Their connection with one another is so deep they often have “difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s” (83). What is sometimes referred to as the “lesbian merger” theory&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; signifies the notion that two lesbians may become indistinguishable from one another because of their desire for one another. In the case of Nel and Sula, whose friendship is predicated on their sameness, we see such a merger physicalized first in their sexual play in the grass as adolescents, when they are closest emotionally, and second in Nel’s disgust at Jude’s act of infidelity with Sula, when they are furthest from one another emotionally. In the former case, Morrison delays explication of the emotion the girls feel in the moment in order to focus instead on their physical actions. The latter collapses the two into a singular pronoun, “they,” which allows the reader to modify whom is referent with each reading of the pronoun. In each case, we are alerted to Nel and Sula’s collapse into one another through formal elements: metaphor and innuendo, then syntax.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In the realist mode, we generally assume the psychic/emotional and physical planes to be distinct planes of existence, even as they may be related. Morrison’s first novel, &lt;em&gt;The Bluest Eye&lt;/em&gt; (1970) has a deep relation to the realist mode, presenting things as they are so well that its subject matter continues to be reason the book is banned.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; However, with &lt;em&gt;Sula&lt;/em&gt; and, a few years after, &lt;em&gt;Song of Solomon&lt;/em&gt; (1977), we see a more magical realist mode develop in her prose. At this early point in her literary career, we should &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 249]&lt;/strong&gt; note, Morrison was constructing what would be a world-renowned style, and with &lt;em&gt;Song of Solomon&lt;/em&gt;, a critical success, she joined the literary establishment. Using the framework of queer phenomenology, this article makes the case that the relationship at the center of the novel disrupts both the spatial planes on which the characters exist and the form of the novel itself. The effect this has is a queering of relation, gender, and form. I choose phenomenology because space and subjective perception seem to be quite important to Morrison’s oeuvre. From &lt;em&gt;The Bluest Eye&lt;/em&gt;’s traumatized protagonist to &lt;em&gt;Beloved&lt;/em&gt;’s haunting history, Morrison’s fiction could very well be characterized by the “ways of inhabiting and bei","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"No Exact Analogue\": Alternative History and the Boundaries of \"Home\" in Herland","authors":"Justin Chandler","doi":"10.1353/saf.2022.a920138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2022.a920138","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; “No Exact Analogue”: &lt;span&gt;Alternative History and the Boundaries of “Home” in &lt;em&gt;Herland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Justin Chandler (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;n the final moments of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel &lt;em&gt;Herland&lt;/em&gt;, our narrator, Van Jennings, reflects on the peculiarities of his new marriage with his Herlandian comrade Ellador ahead of their return to “the Rest of the World.” Van writes that the women of Herland “were right somehow . . . this was the way to feel. It was like—coming home to mother.”&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; He quickly clarifies: “I don’t mean . . . the fussy person that waits on you and spoils you and doesn’t really know you. I mean the feeling that a very little child would have, who had been lost—for ever so long. It was a sense of getting home” (139). While surprising for him, this sense of Herland as both startlingly new and perfectly familiar permeates Van’s reminiscences. On the question of agriculture, education, religion, and intimate relationships, Van repeatedly feels that for all its differences, for all that’s missing, Herland is closer to the ideal that humanity has been striving for all along.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Though scholars have argued that &lt;em&gt;Herland&lt;/em&gt; is the culmination of a utopian impulse running throughout Gilman’s career,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; the novel’s dynamic of character and setting—in which the jarring aspects of a new world simultaneously feel not just superior, but deeply familiar—marks a departure from the framework Gilman commonly employed in her fiction. Works from the 1890 poem “Similar Cases” to the dozens of short stories published from 1909 to 1916 in &lt;em&gt;The Forerunner&lt;/em&gt; dramatized characters at odds with their environment and seeking escape, and Gilman’s sociological work repeatedly called on women to leave the domestic sphere. But the country of Herland, appearing fundamentally alienating, grows increasingly fulfilling over the course of the novel. What’s more, it does so through appealing to relationship and power dynamics rooted in domestic sentimentality, a cultural framework Gilman persistently critiqued. &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 199]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It is my contention that this sense of paradox is best understood by reading &lt;em&gt;Her-land&lt;/em&gt; as an alternative history that recuperates the affective, relational logics of domestic economy and sentimental fiction within the context of a world-system wholly divorced from the operations of industrial capitalism. While there is precedent for reading &lt;em&gt;Herland&lt;/em&gt; and utopian novels as alternative histories,&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; it is my contention that more time spent attending to the past(s) that &lt;em&gt;Herland&lt;/em&gt; recuperates reveals unique insights into Gilman’s fraught navigation of the complex landscape of sex, class, and race.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In what follows, I argue that the practices espoused in Catharine Beech","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"'There has to be a first time for everything,' Eleanor told herself\": Delayed Adolescence and Parentification in The Haunting of Hill House","authors":"Michael T. Wilson","doi":"10.1353/saf.2022.a920139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2022.a920139","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; “‘There has to be a first time for everything,’ Eleanor told herself”: &lt;span&gt;Delayed Adolescence and Parentification in &lt;em&gt;The Haunting of Hill House&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Michael T. Wilson (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;n Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel &lt;em&gt;The Haunting of Hill House,&lt;/em&gt; of the three house guests Dr. Montague summons to take part in his “haunted house” experiment, Eleanor behaves most erratically, her emotions swinging from one extreme to another as she desperately seeks the one thing she cannot find—an autonomous adulthood in a place where she belongs—until her personality disintegrates into the House.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Eleanor’s behavior becomes much more understandable, however, when viewed as that of a young woman struggling through the delayed and parentified adolescence imposed upon her by a needy, domineering mother, a struggle continued and exacerbated by the matriarchal persona presented by Hugh Crain’s seemingly patriarchal creation, Hill House itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Nancy D. Chase’s “Parentification: An Overview of Theory, Research, and Societal Issues” usefully surveys current theory on parentification. In Chase’s words, “parentification [entails] a functional and/or emotional role reversal in which the child sacrifices his or her own needs for attention, comfort, and guidance in order to accommodate and care for logistic and emotional needs of the parent[,] [and] the parentified child may learn in this process that her needs are of less importance than those of others, or may actually become depleted of energy and time for pursuing school, friendships, childhood activities, and, at later stages, exploration of career and relationship possibilities.”&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Although Eleanor can barely imagine an adult life, her attempt to reach it begins with her acceptance of Dr. Montague’s invitation to join his group: “During the whole underside of her life, ever since her first memory, Eleanor had been waiting for something like Hill &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 223]&lt;/strong&gt; House” (4). Eleanor’s long hope for a positive change in her life reflects the trauma that has been inflicted upon her, the “dire and tragic consequences” that Peter K. Smith links to parentification.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Haunting of Hill House&lt;/em&gt; is intensely concerned with parenting, although publishers often gloss over the fact. As the back cover of the first Penguin Classics edition informs the reader, “Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of psychic phenomena; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Luke, the adventurous future inheritor of the estate; and Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman with a dark past.”&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; Eleanor’s “dark past” is simply her traumatized, parentified caring for her mother and ","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"110 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/saf.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Notes on Contributors &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Leah Marie Becker is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work considers the intersection of the environmental humanities, ecoconsumerism, and nineteenth-century domestic ideology. Her previous articles have appeared in &lt;em&gt;Edge Effects&lt;/em&gt; (2021) and &lt;em&gt;Render: Food and Feminist Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; (2014). She is currently writing her dissertation, preliminarily titled \"Living Clean and Shopping Green: A Nineteenth-Century Domestic Prehistory of Ecoconsumption.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Joseph Allen Boone holds an endowed chair for Gender and Media Studies and is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. The author of &lt;em&gt;The Homoerotics of Orientalism&lt;/em&gt; (Columbia University Press, 2015), &lt;em&gt;Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism&lt;/em&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and &lt;em&gt;Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction&lt;/em&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 1987), he is completing a book on \"the Melville effect\" in contemporary art and culture from which this essay is culled. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, the Huntington, the Rockefeller, the National Humanities Center, and the Stanford Humanities Center, Boone has just published his first novel, &lt;em&gt;Furnace Creek&lt;/em&gt; (BSPG 2022).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Jeffory A. Clymer is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is at work on a book exploring finance and risk in American fiction.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Seth Cosimini is a teaching assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. His work focuses on the literature, culture, and thought of the African diaspora; nineteenth-century American literature and culture; and cultural studies. In his current book project, he examines \"classic\" American literature through post-1968 Black thought and argues that racial terror fundamentally structures American romance of the nineteenth century and into its afterlives.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Jane Im is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation \"'The Everyday Affective Life of Racism': Forms of Racial Melancholia in Early Asian American Literature\" argues that racial melancholia is an everyday, stoic, weakly intentional, past-oriented, and collective affect. Her recent publications include \"Allusion, Quotation, and Pastiche in Younghill Kang's &lt;em&gt;The Grass Roof and East Goes West&lt;/em&gt;\" in &lt;em&gt;Studies in the Novel&lt;/em&gt; (2020) and \"Plant Life in Louise Erdrich's &lt;em&gt;The Beet Queen&lt;/em&gt;\" in &lt;em&gt;Studies in American Indian Literatures&lt;/em&gt; (2021).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Veronica Makowsky is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She has published books on Caroline Gordon, Susan Glaspell, and Valerie Martin and articles on Am","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138530228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story \"The Case\"","authors":"E. Williams","doi":"10.1353/saf.2021.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2021.0000","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"16 1","pages":"27 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81556109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Multilingualism and Wordless Faith in Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus","authors":"A. Lossada","doi":"10.1353/saf.2021.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2021.0003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"9 1","pages":"104 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85525530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}