Book Description

Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction, twenty-three essays each carefully revised from the past four decades, explores both range and individual register. The collection opens with considerations of gothic as light and dark in Charles Brockden Brown, war and peace in Cooper’s The Spy, Antarctica as world-genesis in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the link of “The Custom House” and main text in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, reflexive codings in Melville’s Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man, Henry James’ Hawthorne as self-mirroring biography, and Stephen Crane’s working of his Civil War episode in The Red Badge of Courage. Two composite lineages address apocalypse in African American fiction and landscape in women’s authorship from Sarah Orne Jewett to Leslie Marmon Silko. There follow culture and anarchy in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima, text-into-film in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, modernist stylings in Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, and roman noir in Cornell Woolrich. The collection then turns to the limitations of protest categorization for Richard Wright and Chester Himes, autofiction in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the novel of ideas in Robert Penn Warren’s late fiction. Three closing essays take up multicultural genealogy, Harlem, then the Black South, in African American fiction, and the reclamation of voice in Native American fiction.