Pub Date : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9697001
Josef Nguyen
This article considers the cultural politics of frustrated potential for diverse representation in games by examining developer comments on the 1995 digital game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction story of the same name. While Ellison’s story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a “lost opportunity” for exploring gay identity. Rooted in discussion of this frustrated potential for a gay in-game Benny, this article interrogates a logic of lost opportunity for diverse representation present in game-development discourse, which manifests in a longing for more diverse characters that could have been but never came to be. This logic suggests particular ways that developers might conceive of diverse representation as simply a design issue under neoliberal logics of economic opportunity, commercial risk, and fetishized innovation—without meaningful consideration of political significance. Opposing this instrumentalization of frustrated diverse representation, this article draws on queer game studies and speculative design and literature to explore the possible contours and implications of diverse characters that never were more seriously than such comments typically do. Doing so demands more than romanticized longings for lost opportunities for diverse representation that treat this longing as the end in itself.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9697015
A. Wang
Calculated sexual games play out across contemporary American popular media, from self-help books and advice columns to dating apps and reality television. This article argues that economic game theory subtends the saturation of popular culture with lay theories of sex as a “numbers game.” Game theorists contribute to the invisible ubiquity of this phenomenon by using sexual examples to demonstrate the range of their discipline’s models while downplaying the significance of exemplification. Lydia Davis’s short fiction—by taking for granted the economization of intimate relationships without disavowing, naturalizing, or objecting to it—registers the cultural footprint and vernacular intellectual history of the game theory of sex, and elaborates its key modes of fictionality, antinarrativity, and self-fulfilling prophecy. Ultimately, the game theory of sex offers a prehistory of sexual gamification that extends beyond its most immediate digital substrate.
{"title":"The Game Theory of Sex","authors":"A. Wang","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9697015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9697015","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Calculated sexual games play out across contemporary American popular media, from self-help books and advice columns to dating apps and reality television. This article argues that economic game theory subtends the saturation of popular culture with lay theories of sex as a “numbers game.” Game theorists contribute to the invisible ubiquity of this phenomenon by using sexual examples to demonstrate the range of their discipline’s models while downplaying the significance of exemplification. Lydia Davis’s short fiction—by taking for granted the economization of intimate relationships without disavowing, naturalizing, or objecting to it—registers the cultural footprint and vernacular intellectual history of the game theory of sex, and elaborates its key modes of fictionality, antinarrativity, and self-fulfilling prophecy. Ultimately, the game theory of sex offers a prehistory of sexual gamification that extends beyond its most immediate digital substrate.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43540657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9696973
Christopher B. Patterson
This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-racially-identifying North American designers—Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee—and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence.
{"title":"Making Queer Asiatic Worlds: Performance and Racial Interaction in North American Visual Novels","authors":"Christopher B. Patterson","doi":"10.1215/00029831-9696973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9696973","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-racially-identifying North American designers—Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee—and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47317793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9696987
Bonnie Ruberg
This article addresses the seeming absence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in video games from the 1980s and 1990s, the height of the US AIDS crisis. As Adrienne Shaw and Christopher Persaud have noted, stories about HIV/AIDS were pervasive across American popular media during this period, which also represented a boom in video game development. However, documentation remains of only a handful of early video games that mention HIV/AIDS. This article argues that, far from being absent from video game history, HIV/AIDS and the US AIDS crisis were actually influential in shaping a number of the design elements and narrative genres that have become important to contemporary video games. Scholars like Cait McKinney have demonstrated how people living with HIV/AIDS in America played a crucial part in the evolution of internet technologies that now form the backbone of video games. Through a comparative reading of two games by C. M. Ralph, Caper in the Castro (1989) and Murder on Main Street (1989), this article demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has also manifested in the content and form of video games, even (and perhaps especially) when it seems absent. Derritt Mason has explained how Caper in the Castro, widely celebrated as the first LGBTQ video game, contains clear echoes of the AIDS crisis. Yet, as this article demonstrates, HIV/AIDS remains a powerful presence even in Murder on Main Street, Ralph’s “straight version” of the game. Together, these games offer a microcosm through which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the “present absence of queerness in video games.”
这篇文章论述了20世纪80年代和90年代美国艾滋病危机最严重时，电子游戏中似乎没有出现艾滋病毒/艾滋病疫情。正如阿德里安·肖（Adrienne Shaw）和克里斯托弗·佩尔绍德（Christopher Persaud）所指出的，在这一时期，有关艾滋病毒/艾滋病的故事在美国流行媒体上随处可见，这也代表了电子游戏开发的繁荣。然而，仍然只有少数早期提到艾滋病毒/艾滋病的电子游戏的文件。这篇文章认为，艾滋病病毒/艾滋病和美国艾滋病危机在塑造许多对当代电子游戏很重要的设计元素和叙事类型方面发挥了重要作用，这在电子游戏史上并非没有。像Cait McKinney这样的学者已经证明了美国的艾滋病毒/艾滋病患者是如何在互联网技术的发展中发挥关键作用的，而互联网技术现在已经成为电子游戏的支柱。通过对C.M.Ralph的两款游戏的比较阅读，Caper in the Castro（1989）和Murder on Main Street（1989），本文展示了艾滋病毒/艾滋病是如何在电子游戏的内容和形式中表现出来的，即使（也许尤其是）它似乎不存在。德里特·梅森（Derritt Mason）解释了《卡斯特罗中的卡佩尔》（Caper in the Castro）是如何包含艾滋病危机的清晰回声的，该游戏被广泛誉为第一款LGBTQ电子游戏。然而，正如这篇文章所表明的，即使在拉尔夫的“直白版”游戏《主街谋杀案》中，艾滋病毒/艾滋病仍然是一个强大的存在。这些游戏共同提供了一个缩影，通过它可以探索艾滋病毒/艾滋病与电子游戏之间更大的紧张关系，艾滋病危机代表了Cody Mejeur所说的“电子游戏中目前缺乏酷儿”的一个关键因素
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Pub Date : 2022-01-27DOI: 10.1215/00029831-9697029
S. Joyce
This paper examines the historiographic potential of video games with Assassin’s Creed III (2012) as a paradigmatic example that shows the aesthetic and political challenges games face in telling counterhistories of marginalized peoples. The article argues that Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, perhaps the premier historical gaming franchise, has developed an authentic-deconstructionist genre that offers convincing simulacra of historical places and events while using games’ multimedia affordances to question how historical knowledge is constructed. In Assassin’s Creed III, this authentic-deconstructionist method is applied to the story of an Indigenous man trying to protect his tribe from white settlers during the American Revolution. However, the game is critically weakened by the historiographic problem of emplotting this tragic tale in the heroic epic of the nation’s founding. This narrative disjunction is exacerbated by the medium’s lack of an internal aesthetic tradition of tragedy to draw on; mainstream games are generally contests of skill in which success brings victory, rather than the defeat necessary for a tragic outcome. However, despite its weaknesses, the game and its transmedia expansions sparked widespread discussions about Indigenous peoples during this historical period and helped advance gaming as a serious medium for critical perspectives on American history.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-12DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0225
John Steinbeck’s life was framed by global conflict. Born on 27 February 1902, in Salinas, California, he was twelve years old when World War I began and sixteen when Germany and the Allies signed an armistice bringing to cessation the “War to End All Wars.” Unfortunately, World War II began in 1939. Echoes of the rise of Adolf Hitler and threats of war occur throughout his early works, as in the journals accompanying The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which he writes of the angst of his times, fearing the inevitably approaching conflict. When World War II came, he became involved in the wartime efforts, working as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and experiencing the London Blitz, with sixty-six of his eighty-five dispatches gathered in Once There Was a War (1958). Recognizing Steinbeck’s expertise as a writer and desiring to enlist public support, the government commissioned him to write Bombs Away (1942), an account of a bomber team and its specially equipped plane. Hence, he observed American airmen as they trained and went into battle, flying on forays with them. Similarly, during the Vietnam War Newsday hired him as a war correspondent, and again he went to the front and into battle with the enlisted men, with his accounts collected in Letters to Alicia (1965). On the home front, the San Francisco News commissioned him to report on Dust Bowl migrants working as harvesters in California. Incensed by what he witnessed—the specter of starvation, babies and children dying, and malnutrition taking a toll on the very humanity of the migrants—he wrote The Harvest Gypsies (1936), background for The Grapes of Wrath. An early ecologist, Steinbeck loved the land, depicting the earth as a living, sensate character in The Grapes of Wrath—an elegiac mourning over its the desecration. Later, his nonfiction America and Americans (1966) decried pollution and the felling of redwood trees. Looking into the future with some hope but much trepidation, this work also addressed ethnic and racial prejudices, questionable politics, ageism and sexism, loss of ethical moorings. Believing his country to be infested with a deadly immorality, he warned Americans to root out this cancerous growth in order to survive. His last work of fiction, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), carried these same concerns, with protagonist Ethan Allen Hawley portrayed as an Every American, who must rise above his failings. John Steinbeck died 20 December 1968, of congestive heart failure.
{"title":"John Steinbeck","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0225","url":null,"abstract":"John Steinbeck’s life was framed by global conflict. Born on 27 February 1902, in Salinas, California, he was twelve years old when World War I began and sixteen when Germany and the Allies signed an armistice bringing to cessation the “War to End All Wars.” Unfortunately, World War II began in 1939. Echoes of the rise of Adolf Hitler and threats of war occur throughout his early works, as in the journals accompanying The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which he writes of the angst of his times, fearing the inevitably approaching conflict. When World War II came, he became involved in the wartime efforts, working as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and experiencing the London Blitz, with sixty-six of his eighty-five dispatches gathered in Once There Was a War (1958). Recognizing Steinbeck’s expertise as a writer and desiring to enlist public support, the government commissioned him to write Bombs Away (1942), an account of a bomber team and its specially equipped plane. Hence, he observed American airmen as they trained and went into battle, flying on forays with them. Similarly, during the Vietnam War Newsday hired him as a war correspondent, and again he went to the front and into battle with the enlisted men, with his accounts collected in Letters to Alicia (1965). On the home front, the San Francisco News commissioned him to report on Dust Bowl migrants working as harvesters in California. Incensed by what he witnessed—the specter of starvation, babies and children dying, and malnutrition taking a toll on the very humanity of the migrants—he wrote The Harvest Gypsies (1936), background for The Grapes of Wrath. An early ecologist, Steinbeck loved the land, depicting the earth as a living, sensate character in The Grapes of Wrath—an elegiac mourning over its the desecration. Later, his nonfiction America and Americans (1966) decried pollution and the felling of redwood trees. Looking into the future with some hope but much trepidation, this work also addressed ethnic and racial prejudices, questionable politics, ageism and sexism, loss of ethical moorings. Believing his country to be infested with a deadly immorality, he warned Americans to root out this cancerous growth in order to survive. His last work of fiction, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), carried these same concerns, with protagonist Ethan Allen Hawley portrayed as an Every American, who must rise above his failings. John Steinbeck died 20 December 1968, of congestive heart failure.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61153302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-12DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0012
Evan S. Connell (b. 1924–d. 2013) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up there in a prosperous family with historical ties—reflected in his middle name, Shelby—to Confederate general Jo Shelby. Although his physician father expected his namesake son to join him in his medical practice, Connell, while at Dartmouth College, began to consider more creative options, including writing and making art. After a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy Air Corps during World War II—he never left the country—Connell began writing down his experiences and finished his undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas. On the Lawrence, Kansas, campus, he studied art and continued to write, under the tutelage of Ray B. West, who edited the Western Review. With aid from the G.I. Bill and encouragement from West, Connell successfully applied to Wallace Stegner’s first class of creative writing fellows at Stanford University. He spent another year in writing and art classes at Columbia University in New York. Ultimately, he saw more of a future in writing, though he kept up a practice of life drawing and painting for many years. Connell had an early run of published short stories, beginning in 1946. After a fallow period in California, Connell went to Paris in 1952, where he became acquainted with the founding editors of The Paris Review. The literary journal published three of Connell’s stories, including segments from Connell’s novel in progress, which eventually was titled Mrs. Bridge. By then, Connell had taken up residence in San Francisco. After rejection by several New York publishers, the Viking Press took on Connell, releasing a story collection in 1957 before cementing Connell’s reputation with Mrs. Bridge, a quietly evocative portrait of a prosperous, middle-American family, which became his most admired and lucrative work of fiction. Over the next five decades Connell veered into an extraordinary variety of works—fiction, nonfiction, history, and hybrid experiments that looked like epic poetry. This pattern of no pattern in the arc of Connell’s work, combined with his lack of interest in self-promotion, seemed to confuse the New York publishing world, and critics often cited his unpredictability as the cause of a kind of literary marginalization. His sprawling account of Custer at the Little Bighorn became hugely popular in the 1980s, raising his profile and reviving his reputation as a writer.
{"title":"Evan S. Connell","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0012","url":null,"abstract":"Evan S. Connell (b. 1924–d. 2013) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up there in a prosperous family with historical ties—reflected in his middle name, Shelby—to Confederate general Jo Shelby. Although his physician father expected his namesake son to join him in his medical practice, Connell, while at Dartmouth College, began to consider more creative options, including writing and making art. After a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy Air Corps during World War II—he never left the country—Connell began writing down his experiences and finished his undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas. On the Lawrence, Kansas, campus, he studied art and continued to write, under the tutelage of Ray B. West, who edited the Western Review. With aid from the G.I. Bill and encouragement from West, Connell successfully applied to Wallace Stegner’s first class of creative writing fellows at Stanford University. He spent another year in writing and art classes at Columbia University in New York. Ultimately, he saw more of a future in writing, though he kept up a practice of life drawing and painting for many years. Connell had an early run of published short stories, beginning in 1946. After a fallow period in California, Connell went to Paris in 1952, where he became acquainted with the founding editors of The Paris Review. The literary journal published three of Connell’s stories, including segments from Connell’s novel in progress, which eventually was titled Mrs. Bridge. By then, Connell had taken up residence in San Francisco. After rejection by several New York publishers, the Viking Press took on Connell, releasing a story collection in 1957 before cementing Connell’s reputation with Mrs. Bridge, a quietly evocative portrait of a prosperous, middle-American family, which became his most admired and lucrative work of fiction. Over the next five decades Connell veered into an extraordinary variety of works—fiction, nonfiction, history, and hybrid experiments that looked like epic poetry. This pattern of no pattern in the arc of Connell’s work, combined with his lack of interest in self-promotion, seemed to confuse the New York publishing world, and critics often cited his unpredictability as the cause of a kind of literary marginalization. His sprawling account of Custer at the Little Bighorn became hugely popular in the 1980s, raising his profile and reviving his reputation as a writer.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47307086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-12DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0019
Royall Tyler (b. 1757–d. 1826) was born to a prominent merchant family in Boston and came of age in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. He entered Harvard College in 1771 and earned his bachelor of arts degree three months after the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Tyler then enlisted in the Revolutionary Army, although he remained in Boston and Cambridge studying law. His active military service seems to have been limited to serving as a brigade major during the unsuccessful 1778 attempt to capture Newport, Rhode Island. As the war continued, Tyler earned his master of arts degree from Harvard in 1779 and engaged in a failed courtship of Abigail Adams, the daughter of future president John Adams. After the war, Tyler became involved in the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion in 1786. When Daniel Shays fled to Vermont, Tyler was assigned to negotiate with authorities in New York, which still laid claim to the territory, to ensure that the rebel did not find safe harbor. In New York City Tyler launched his literary career; in April 1787, The Contrast began its run in New York as the first professionally produced American comic drama and one of the first successful American plays. Months later Tyler produced a second play, May Day in Town, that is no longer extant. In 1790, Tyler returned to Boston and married Mary Palmer, who would later publish the first American manual for infant care. They relocated to Vermont, where the couple remained for the rest of their lives. In the years to follow, Tyler published numerous poems and essays, including a popular series of essays in collaboration with Joseph Dennie under the title of “Colon & Spondee.” In 1797, Tyler published the novel The Algerine Captive, which achieved moderate success and was one of the first American books to be republished in Great Britain. In the 1800s and 1810s Tyler served for six years as the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and launched a failed bid for the U.S. Senate. He completed several new plays, including his biblical dramas and the epistolary satire The Yankey in London (1809). At the time of his death in 1826 he was rewriting the first half of The Algerine Captive as a New England picaresque titled The Bay Boy, which would remain unpublished until 1968.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-23DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0009
Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (b. 1875–d. 1954) was a Chinese North American author best known for fiction published under the faux-Japanese penname “Onoto Watanna.” In her forty-year career, Eaton published nineteen novels, many of which were critically acclaimed and translated into many languages. Eaton also published hundreds of stories, poems, and articles in US, Canadian, Jamaican, and English magazines and newspapers. She was born in Montreal to a white British father and a Chinese mother who married in China and, after brief stays in England and the United States, emigrated to Canada. Whereas Winnifred pretended to be Japanese, Eaton’s older sister Edith wrote sympathetically about diasporic Chinese using the pen name “Sui Sin Far”; with her sister Sara, Winnifred co-wrote Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914), one of the first Asian American cookbooks. Sara’s experiences also inspired Winnifred Eaton’s novel Marion (1916). In 1895, Eaton began her writing career working as a reporter in Jamaica. Soon afterward, she moved to Cincinnati, where she first assumed the identity of a half-Japanese, and then to Chicago. Writing as “Onoto Watanna,” Eaton published prolifically about Japanese life, exploring romantic encounters between Americans and Japanese and the experiences of mixed-race children and interracial kinship. Her Miss Numè of Japan (1898) is the first novel in English by a writer of Asian descent published in North America. In 1901, when she was living in New York, Eaton married journalist Bertrand Babcock and published her novel A Japanese Nightingale, which skyrocketed her to fame, inspiring a play, a film, and an opera. After reviewers expressed doubts about her Japanese identity, however, Eaton tried to leave Japanese subjects behind her. She submitted Diary of Delia (1907) to publishers under another pseudonym, published Me (1915) and Marion (1916) anonymously, and published one final Japanese-themed text, Sunny-San, in 1922. In 1917, after divorcing Babcock, Eaton married American businessman Francis Reeve, moved to Alberta, and rebranded herself as “Winnifred Reeve,” rancher’s wife and Canadian literary nationalist. There, Eaton wrote Cattle, a powerful naturalist novel about a girl raped by her employer, and His Royal Nibs, a romance between an English aristocrat and a young Alberta woman, and tried her hand at writing screenplays. Eaton received her first film credit in 1921 on Universal’s “False Kisses.” When the Reeves’ ranch failed, Eaton joined the East Coast scenario department of Universal, a then-minor film producer, and soon afterward was made its Hollywood editor-in-chief and literary advisor. Eaton collaborated on dozens of screenplays and adaptations, translating her experience writing Japanese romances into scripts featuring exotic locales and peoples, as well as commissioned scripts during Universal’s transition from “silents” to “talkies”. She also ghostwrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Eaton left Holly
{"title":"Winnifred Eaton","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (b. 1875–d. 1954) was a Chinese North American author best known for fiction published under the faux-Japanese penname “Onoto Watanna.” In her forty-year career, Eaton published nineteen novels, many of which were critically acclaimed and translated into many languages. Eaton also published hundreds of stories, poems, and articles in US, Canadian, Jamaican, and English magazines and newspapers. She was born in Montreal to a white British father and a Chinese mother who married in China and, after brief stays in England and the United States, emigrated to Canada. Whereas Winnifred pretended to be Japanese, Eaton’s older sister Edith wrote sympathetically about diasporic Chinese using the pen name “Sui Sin Far”; with her sister Sara, Winnifred co-wrote Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914), one of the first Asian American cookbooks. Sara’s experiences also inspired Winnifred Eaton’s novel Marion (1916). In 1895, Eaton began her writing career working as a reporter in Jamaica. Soon afterward, she moved to Cincinnati, where she first assumed the identity of a half-Japanese, and then to Chicago. Writing as “Onoto Watanna,” Eaton published prolifically about Japanese life, exploring romantic encounters between Americans and Japanese and the experiences of mixed-race children and interracial kinship. Her Miss Numè of Japan (1898) is the first novel in English by a writer of Asian descent published in North America. In 1901, when she was living in New York, Eaton married journalist Bertrand Babcock and published her novel A Japanese Nightingale, which skyrocketed her to fame, inspiring a play, a film, and an opera. After reviewers expressed doubts about her Japanese identity, however, Eaton tried to leave Japanese subjects behind her. She submitted Diary of Delia (1907) to publishers under another pseudonym, published Me (1915) and Marion (1916) anonymously, and published one final Japanese-themed text, Sunny-San, in 1922. In 1917, after divorcing Babcock, Eaton married American businessman Francis Reeve, moved to Alberta, and rebranded herself as “Winnifred Reeve,” rancher’s wife and Canadian literary nationalist. There, Eaton wrote Cattle, a powerful naturalist novel about a girl raped by her employer, and His Royal Nibs, a romance between an English aristocrat and a young Alberta woman, and tried her hand at writing screenplays. Eaton received her first film credit in 1921 on Universal’s “False Kisses.” When the Reeves’ ranch failed, Eaton joined the East Coast scenario department of Universal, a then-minor film producer, and soon afterward was made its Hollywood editor-in-chief and literary advisor. Eaton collaborated on dozens of screenplays and adaptations, translating her experience writing Japanese romances into scripts featuring exotic locales and peoples, as well as commissioned scripts during Universal’s transition from “silents” to “talkies”. She also ghostwrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Eaton left Holly","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45066241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-27DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0227
Henry Roth (b. 1906–d. 1995) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose autobiographically based fiction helped define immigrant fiction and American Jewish literature. Born in Tysmenitz, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he resettled in the United States with his family in 1908. They at first lived in Brooklyn before moving to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In 1914 they moved uptown to Harlem, where Roth attended City College of New York. While still an undergraduate, he was befriended by and moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and an instructor at New York University. With her support, he wrote Call It Sleep, a powerful account of life on the Lower East Side as experienced by a little immigrant Jewish boy. The novel was published in 1934, to critical acclaim but few sales. By the early 1940s, disillusioned with the New York literary scene, he moved with his new wife, the musician Muriel Parker, whom he had met at the artists’ colony Yaddo, to Maine, where he made a subsistence living raising and slaughtering waterfowl. Call It Sleep had meanwhile fallen out of print and public awareness until a paperback edition was published in 1964 and hailed as a neglected masterpiece. Suddenly a bestselling author, Roth, who had written only a few short stories and essays—later collected in Shifting Landscape: A Composite (1987)—during the interim, slowly returned to writing. However, it was only after moving to New Mexico and the death of his beloved wife that Roth felt free to pour forth in fiction drawn closely from his own life. During his final decade, often in pain and longing for death, the octogenarian tapped out thousands of manuscript pages from which his assistant, Felicia Steele, and his editor, Robert Weil, carved out a tetralogy filled with painful personal revelations. In 1994, sixty years after his first novel, Call It Sleep, Roth was back in print with his second, the first volume of a series that took the title Mercy of a Rude Stream. The tetralogy consisted of A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park (1994), A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995), From Bondage (1996), and Requiem for Harlem (1998). The last two of the four volumes were published posthumously, as was an additional novel—excavated from the final manuscripts—titled An American Type (2010).
{"title":"Henry Roth","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0227","url":null,"abstract":"Henry Roth (b. 1906–d. 1995) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose autobiographically based fiction helped define immigrant fiction and American Jewish literature. Born in Tysmenitz, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he resettled in the United States with his family in 1908. They at first lived in Brooklyn before moving to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In 1914 they moved uptown to Harlem, where Roth attended City College of New York. While still an undergraduate, he was befriended by and moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and an instructor at New York University. With her support, he wrote Call It Sleep, a powerful account of life on the Lower East Side as experienced by a little immigrant Jewish boy. The novel was published in 1934, to critical acclaim but few sales. By the early 1940s, disillusioned with the New York literary scene, he moved with his new wife, the musician Muriel Parker, whom he had met at the artists’ colony Yaddo, to Maine, where he made a subsistence living raising and slaughtering waterfowl. Call It Sleep had meanwhile fallen out of print and public awareness until a paperback edition was published in 1964 and hailed as a neglected masterpiece. Suddenly a bestselling author, Roth, who had written only a few short stories and essays—later collected in Shifting Landscape: A Composite (1987)—during the interim, slowly returned to writing. However, it was only after moving to New Mexico and the death of his beloved wife that Roth felt free to pour forth in fiction drawn closely from his own life. During his final decade, often in pain and longing for death, the octogenarian tapped out thousands of manuscript pages from which his assistant, Felicia Steele, and his editor, Robert Weil, carved out a tetralogy filled with painful personal revelations. In 1994, sixty years after his first novel, Call It Sleep, Roth was back in print with his second, the first volume of a series that took the title Mercy of a Rude Stream. The tetralogy consisted of A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park (1994), A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995), From Bondage (1996), and Requiem for Harlem (1998). The last two of the four volumes were published posthumously, as was an additional novel—excavated from the final manuscripts—titled An American Type (2010).","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41508242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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